Sunday, June 01, 2008

The Importance of Apple

Recently at work I couldn't help chuckling and shaking my head as I went through a list of requirements for a well known MNC - buried in the middle of was 'Oracle support' - there, that's an enterprise customer, I thought. It's one of those 'enterprise' requirements that clients who work in multi-storeyed glass and concrete buildings with large cube farms feel concerned about regardless of whether it makes any real difference to their work. This was not the first time that I had heard users asking for Oracle support. It's all about making the right noises, which is what enterprise software is all about. I was more annoyed with the business development folks for not having nipped this in the bud than with the customer. A couple of days later I was reading an interview with the author of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X when I came across this heart warming section:

Scott: The Mac appears to be making real inroads in the mainstream consumer computing market, and certainly the iPhone is doing the same. Do you expect to see this carry over to the corporate world?

Aaron: Apple seems to doing its best to keep Macs out of the corporate world. Most dialogues between Apple and a corporation go something like this: