Howard Oakley
Apple has become a success by offering a diverse range of products, but it needs to remember its roots if it’s to continue its current renaissance.
It seems that the days of the Renaissance man are long past, it being exceptional to find contemporary artists who are great all-rounders. Among the last to achieve greatness across most genres of painting were Claude Monet and John Singer Sargent, while the late Robert Altman was one of the few film directors to match that in moving images (even making a string of industrial shorts at the start of his long career). Have the various genres become so technically demanding that our best and brightest can no longer excel at more than one or two? Or perhaps the drive for ‘branding’ is imposing commercial barriers?
In the past few years, Apple has become remarkably successful in a range of computing genres, formalised by its dropping the word ‘Computer’ from its name. From its tiniest £46 iPod Shuffle to eight-core Mac Pros and Xserves running to more than £5000, its products have never been so diverse. This is good for Apple, and good for Mac users: aside from the commercial benefits of a spread portfolio, technologies are transferred between product lines, and the broad range of systems more or less integrated.
Systems integration is the watch-phrase of the corporate purchaser, too. While you and I may be happy to buy whatever seems to do the job best for us, large organisations need to make each part of their equipment inventory fully compatible with their overall system design, and integrated into their security, backup and other over-arching policies. Initially, despite the iPhone’s many advantages over the corporate favourite, BlackBerry, Apple’s prodigy fell short for those trying to integrate it into corporate systems.
Servers still sit at the heart of most large organisations, and can induce peculiar preferences throughout the rest of a system. With Microsoft’s Exchange, Active Directory and other server products deeply embedded in so many, compatibility and inter-working is essential – features developed in successive releases of Mac OS X Server and now quite usefully mature. From its early server offerings based on mainstream Unix, Apple has come a long way in trying to please the corporate systems integrator.
Faced with the sustained, but now fading, success of the iPod and the meteoric rise of the iPhone, Apple with the iPad could easily commit itself more completely down this road into purely consumer electronics. But as those with previously outstandingly successful consumer products can attest, that market is notoriously fickle.
Sony has struggled for years to repeat the success of the Walkman, spending in excess of the economies of several small countries in its efforts, only to be overwhelmed by the iPod. Acceptance into the fabric of corporates and other large organisations such as universities and government departments is far less sexy, but profoundly stabilising.
This may pose Apple the plate-spinning problem, forced to dash furiously around waggling wands to keep every flagging plate from falling off, but it – and we – can’t afford to let the Mac client and server lines cruise quietly along into oblivion. Falling investment in the development of more conventional computer hardware, operating systems, and applications would turn its current broad portfolio into a bubble, ready to pop when the affluent young find another fad.
So as it counts our heads while we queue to buy our iPads, Apple needs to look to the next iMac design, the successor to current Mac Pros and where it will go with Mac OS X 10.7. For these are the products that will determine whether it will sustain its current renaissance.
