Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Business Essentials

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 316 posts

Re: Business Essentials

#231

Post by motohagiography »

vineyardmike wrote: post #190
motohagiography wrote: post #132

Smart play to focus on businesses with fewer than 500 employees, as those are the most likely to grow in the next 3-7 years into larger accounts, and they don't have the 12-18mo sales cycle and shennanigans of an enterprise. It's a strategic departure from being a consumer luxury product company, and the shift to enterprise suggests they're out of ideas, but at the rate they're losing consumer growth I'd say they've…

> the shift to enterprise suggests they're out of ideas Pretty sure its just the way to profit off of all types of users, keep cash flow coming and grow the business. When their app store faces anti-trust, and everyone already has an iphone and the next igadget is 5 years away, how do you generate growth?

> When their app store faces anti-trust, and everyone already has an iphone and the next igadget is 5 years away, how do you generate growth?

I'd suggest this is the definition of being out of ideas, as the way they grew last time was they invented the iPhone, and then the iPod, and then the Airbook, Apple Watch, and AirPods. Then there was the mini tracking device to help you believe every other product wasn't already a tracking device.

Imo, the negative inflection point was the AppleTV launch where it was just a bunch of celebrities, and for Cook to stay at the helm, he needs to deliver a Jobs level win. Enterprise may be his "second envelope," as I think it's a safety play.

Reframing your question as, what can they re-invent next? That's hard to answer without being that level of design thinker. Cook's team is designing products for a very different world than the one Jobs did. The aesthetics, aspirations, and even power means different things now, as they say, what got us here doesn't get us where we need to go next. The enterprise product is going to be huge revenue wise, but innovation wise, I think it's treading water.

Maybe the smartest thing to do is to turn Apple into a company that doesn't need to run on genius anymore, and fork a design driven ventures division with a mission to get exposure to early stage brilliance instead. What Jobs did was bring artists to tech, but that whole play was predicated on a bohemian/creative class that doesn't matter the same way anymore because their rarity and scarcity was an artifact of geography that is no longer a factor. This bringing something from one place to another aspect of Jobs' vision (and cultural arbitrage) breaks down when that physical distance is no longer meaningful.

The distance to bridge with products now is intellectual, educational, cultural, political, etc, and maybe we don't want it bridged now, maybe what we desire is that distance again. The next iPhone level innovation won't be a signifier of joining the middle class of that time, it will be either a barrier to it, or an escape from it.

Re: Business Essentials

#233

Post by zeusk »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #200
zeusk wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

screen readers don't do OCR.

That's kind of my point - I don't understand how you could go about identifying words on screen with a strike-through in the way they described.

Depends on how you implement the strikethrough; if you use the HTML tag - the screen reader will have zero trouble.

Although with all the vDOM and JavaScript crap these days, web is quite inaccessible compared to most native apps.

Re: Business Essentials

#234

Post by TimTheTinker »

zeusk wrote: post #154
short12 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didnt they already try this and it was a huge failure

Who remembers xserve?

I cried a tear or two when they deprecated it. Apple can do enterprise hardware... just because Linux and x86 hardware became commoditized doesn't mean there isn't room for further innovation.

I think Apple should come out with an M1 Enterprise chip and a line of data center/server hardware to compete with Oxide. As for an OS, why not hire Hector Martin and adopt a particular flavor of Linux (maybe partner with Red Hat)?

Re: Business Essentials

#235

Post by thereddaikon »

motohagiography wrote: post #132

Smart play to focus on businesses with fewer than 500 employees, as those are the most likely to grow in the next 3-7 years into larger accounts, and they don't have the 12-18mo sales cycle and shennanigans of an enterprise. It's a strategic departure from being a consumer luxury product company, and the shift to enterprise suggests they're out of ideas, but at the rate they're losing consumer growth I'd say they've…

Smart to focus on smaller businesses but foolish albeit expected to only include Apple products in the solution. I'd put money on the overwhelming majority of businesses that have any Apple devices also have non Apple devices. Very few will be purely Apple environments and those that are would hardly qualify as enterprise environments. The reason is simple, Apple has failed to provide the needed suite of enterprise solutions to allow a company to build themselves around their ecosystem. You can do it in the home but Apple doesn't sell servers anymore or allow anyone to develop server products for them.

Re: Business Essentials

#236

Post by easton »

numbsafari wrote: post #206

The challenge for Apple is going to be their unwillingness to integrate with others. Business Manager only integrates with MS Azure Active Directory for IAM. The vast majority of small business do not have Azure Active Directory. They either have nothing, or they have Google Workspace. Apple needs to not just launch a competitor for AD. They need to properly support integrated directory services with a broader range…

> vast majority of small business do not have Azure Active Directory

Where are you from? On the east coast of the US, I find it uncommon to find small businesses who aren't still all in on Office, which if you've bought it in the last five years, was probably via a subscription that gives you Azure AD (and Exchange, Teams, etc). GSuite is still very uncommon in my experience outside of schools.

Re: Business Essentials

#237

Post by mixmastamyk »

mlyle wrote: post #211
mixmastamyk wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowing these thing exist is a great first step, and glad to hear you are helping out. But, it doesn't become a concrete, visceral thing until you inspect a no-script menu while browsing a news site. Or run Little Snitch on a freshly unboxed Mac. Or going to a "white pages" site and see the last four addresses of your family members. Salary info, current whereabouts, criminal history, are a fee away. It's a different…

Yes, but the whole world won't be developers. And many in the know just don't care. You're talking about a population of 12 to 18 year olds. Even among the most responsible and least-easily influenced of them, social pressures absolutely dwarf any abstract concerns about corporations knowing a bit more about broke-ass you to try and sell you things. Most of this population will take a short term gain for an uncertain…

I can only affect my kingdom, what others do is mostly not my concern. Reminds me of the corporate garbage “food” products most people consume. I speak out but not going to steal their doritos.

Re: Business Essentials

#238

Post by Closi »

thereddaikon wrote: post #235
motohagiography wrote: post #132

Smart play to focus on businesses with fewer than 500 employees, as those are the most likely to grow in the next 3-7 years into larger accounts, and they don't have the 12-18mo sales cycle and shennanigans of an enterprise. It's a strategic departure from being a consumer luxury product company, and the shift to enterprise suggests they're out of ideas, but at the rate they're losing consumer growth I'd say they've…

Smart to focus on smaller businesses but foolish albeit expected to only include Apple products in the solution. I'd put money on the overwhelming majority of businesses that have any Apple devices also have non Apple devices. Very few will be purely Apple environments and those that are would hardly qualify as enterprise environments. The reason is simple, Apple has failed to provide the needed suite of enterprise s…

> Smart to focus on smaller businesses but foolish albeit expected to only include Apple products in the solution.

Eh, it depends why you think they are doing it.

If you think they are offering this because they want to get into selling MDM software, then yeah, it's foolish.

If, on the other hand, you imagine that they are offering this because they want to encourage small businesses to go 'wall-to-wall' Apple, and for a benefit of this to be that if you go 'Apple' you effectively have some level of a technical support contract too with on-site hardware repairs (not really offered in a compelling way by any other hardware vendor), then it might not be so foolish from a commercial perspective.

I suspect it's the latter - make going 'all in' on Apple a super appealing proposition for small businesses.

The second thing is, Windows is very appealing for small businesses because, amongst other things, configuration and management of users, sign ins, security policies e.t.c. through AAD / Office 365 is brilliant, so this seems to close the gap a bit.

> Apple doesn't sell servers anymore or allow anyone to develop server products for them.

This seems to be more like an MDM/device management and user management/onboarding solution, not something you would install or use to manage servers.

Re: Business Essentials

#239

Post by noway421 »

ryanianian wrote: post #84
supernovae wrote: post #74

I wish they had a better MDM for kids... All I want to do is ensure that NextDNS is installed/forced and that they can't remove it. Somehow, if you block store, block adding apps and block removing apps and hide the icons, kids still figure out how to remove the damn thing and the only thing you can do to block it is set a 1 minute time limit (why can't you set 0 minutes? wtf apple?) and hope they don't stay up until…

The "at your own peril" strategy is effective for some. Or go the panopticon route: "I have software on the router that can see everything you do, but I don't usually look at it."

Unless you're running a MITM proxy for SSL traffic with root certificates installed on the home devices, this statement can not be true. And if you're running such a proxy, you would need to have a guest WiFi for people coming into the house who would like to use internet without installing the certificate. At that point, circumventing the tracking is the matter of connecting to the guest WiFi.

Re: Business Essentials

#240

Post by mike_d »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #63
nlh wrote: post #60

So just to make sure I'm reading this correctly (this is not my area of speciality so bear with me): This is Apple-hosted MDM, yes? I took a brief spin through this world on a consulting project a few years ago and I found it SUPER weird that Apple didn't do this already. You had to do this weird dance between Apple Business Manager and the MDM solution (we ended up with SimpleMDM but looked at a bunch). I kept sayin…

They already have Fleetsmith. This is their response to Jumpcloud and what not who are offering lower per user plans, as fleetsmith was around $8/device/mo.

> This is their response to Jumpcloud and what not who are offering lower per user plans

They couldn't care less about a few dollars. This is about heading off business adoption of Chromebooks, and "winning" small-medium businesses as primarily Mac shops before they become big-enterprise.

Post reply on HN