The Applefication of the Enterprise, Part II: The Jobs' Effect

In a series of posts over the next few months on MIKE2.0, I’ll be delving into a nascent trend: the Applefication of the Enterprise. Today’s introductory post lays a bit of the groundwork for the series. Here's an excerpt of part two:

Steve Jobs despised focus groups. He was famous for not listening to what customers wanted, but telling them what they wanted. Today, Applephiles are taking a cue from their iconic leader and are increasingly doing the same thing at work. Technology at work is often unnecessarily complicated and they know that there’s a better, simpler way. They’re mad as hell and they’re not gonna take it anymore.

The key question is not whether Apple products can be tweaked to meet the current and complex needs of large, sophisticated organizations and their IT departments. That’s so 1999. Rather, Apple products and evangelists are forcing executives to ask themselves why their technology needs are so complex in the first place. Why do they need to maintain these bloated applications and byzantine requirements? And how everything can be dramatically simplified?

And here’s the funny thing. It’s actually working. Jobs is starting to change the very DNA of IT departments from the grave. Case in point: In the last six months, Apple’s enterprise sales have exploded almost by accident. This explosion is even more remarkable when you consider that historically Apple has not chased corporate clients at all. In this vein, the company is the antithesis of Dell, IBM, and Microsoft.

To read the entire post, click here.