Editorials @ Applelust

Will There Be a Corporate Mac?

I always find it amusing when someone realizes that he (yes, it's always a 'he') knows what Apple needs to do, and chooses to honor some online forum of instant gratification with his revelations. Blogs, discussion boards, and even otherwise perfectly good websites have fallen victim to such fits of know-it-all graphomania.

According to these writings, Apple is usually just plain doomed, unless it immediately releases some very specific product, which the author will be quick to identify and immediately lobby for. Is it a DJ iPod? A Tablet Mac? Or maybe a resurrected Newton? Well, in any case, it will certainly be a product with a market for at least one complimentary review copy, if not much else.

Today, I'm joining this honorable team of armchair Phil Schillers, and going out on a limb to offer some totally unfounded speculation on what Apple could, and perhaps even should do in order to make a strong entry into the enterprise market.

Incidentally, 'could' and 'should' should not be confused here. Here's the point I'm about to make: Apple could very likely offer a real enterprise desktop solution, but it shouldn't go ahead and do it the way it easily could. But the big question is, could it do it the way it should? And then, should it really do that? Don't worry, like I said, I will pretend to know some answers, too. Let's jump right in.

Easy path, hard life

A 2002 analysis on the Partnerpoint website puts the corporate PC target price in the $600-$650 range per unit, without monitor, after volume discounts, and predicts further decreases. Sure enough, you can today configure a Dell Dimension 2400 (scroll down for options, or never mind...) so that it costs around $550 without a monitor, and that's before any volume discounts. Moreover, HP's d300/d200 series, recommended (at least by HP) for enterprises, starts at a decidedly un-Mac-like $359.

If Apple wanted a Mac capable of an 'easy' entry into the enterprise market, it could pull it off with a compelling desktop Mac priced in the $500-$600 range. Right now, the only Mac that comes close is the $799 eMac (complete with built-in 17" monitor), but is it seriously a corporate player? While its computing power may be sufficient for most corporate desktop uses (i.e. running Word and Excel until the processor throws up), its unprofessional look, bulky design and lack of monitor options may still make it an unattractive choice for corporate IT.

So? Take off the screen, save perhaps half a ton of plastic, and slash $300 off the price, and there's your corporate Mac. It would be perfect. It might even sell, too, if Apple gets the marketing right.

This would be the easy way. At least it looks darn easy from this comfy chair. Remember: I'm mostly talking about the actual hardware here, not the PR efforts needed to convince the corporate world out there that Apple's offerings are a viable alternative. One can only hope that Apple eventually gets around to convincing IT execs that their usual main objection, namely that "wait, MAC has already like gone out of business, or sumptin'" has at least two flaws, not even counting the erroneous capitalization.

What's wrong with the easy way is that it could, as a side effect, bankrupt Apple just as easily. If cheaper Macs are available and they can do everything an entry-level eMac or iMac does, then why should consumers pay more for the latter two? Some serious cannibalization could take place. Though it's hard to predict, a bad scenario could result in a loss of so many eMac and iMac sales to the new, low-margin enterprise model that it could hurt Apple's bottom line quite badly. Remember: Apple is still a boutique. It would be happier selling to the masses, but that ain't happening (yet). Apple still lives off its hefty price margins on machines targeted at wealthy customers and discerning professionals. However, "wealthy" or "discerning" isn't necessary synonymous with "suckers." Who knows, these decent folks might also know a bargain if they see one, especially if it still comes from Apple: while the Mac's core audience may never switch to a Dell, it could much more likely switch to a cheaper Mac.

Therefore, I think unleashing a full-featured, $500 Mac to the unsuspecting public could spell disaster for Apple, so it's not very likely to happen. But then what do I know? My red phone to Cupertino never rings these days. Incidentally, as I got this far in re-reading my article, I discovered this MacOPINION article by Dell Miller, asking the same question and contemplating a similar scenario. It's an interesting read.

Cripple with Care?

So if Apple doesn't want to (or 'shouldn't') sell a cheap, full-featured Mac that's available to anyone, then what are the options? Not being cheap; not being full-featured; or not being available to everyone. We can safely eliminate the first option: expensive Macs are already available, thank you very much. The answer, if any, must lie in the second two.

Of course, unlike the (at first) education-only eMac, there's no way to make a new Mac "corporate only" by enforcing some sales policy. Like, "I'm sorry sir, but a business suit and fluency in corporate BS won't qualify you for this purchase." Specify a minimum number of units bought by a client? Refuse to sell to private individuals? Well, I don't think such sales policies could seriously be enforced, except maybe by putting a cop next to every unit sold to prevent it from being resold to individuals. It just wouldn't work. A "$500 Mac" would make some headlines, and ecstatic users would start sharing their "how I eschewed Apple's policy to get mine" stories faster than you can say "End-User License Agreement." Releasing Apple's legal hounds to hunt down these offenders could create a huge backlash among Apple users. Moreover, seeing that a $500 Mac is possible, people could even start questioning Apple's pricing strategy on other models. In short, it would be a PR situation for Apple that only a Wintel columnist could wish for.

So what's left is modifying the product itself so that only corporations would want it. At least, that's something Apple is exceptionally good at: crippling. Just think of how beautifully Apple limits the video-out capabilities of the graphics cards it puts in iBooks and iMacs. That should put all your worries to rest.

But this kind of crippling must be done carefully. That's the hardest part. Half-baked solutions, like employing an industrial design that only the kind of person who approves corporate IT budgets could like, would probably be futile. Mac fans would embrace a new Jonathan Ive design even if it were based on some toilet sketch from his previous job.

How about crippling performance? No way. If you've ever used Microsoft Office, you'll know that performing a spell check on a five-page Word document seems to need more computing resources than Pixar used for rendering every frame in its last three movies. Besides, Mac OS X itself is pretty resource-hungry. And what could be more embarrassing than fragging pawns at a measley 20 FPS in Panther's 3D chess game? So performance stays intact, making the hypothetical Corporate Mac (let me call it "cMac," before suggesting another name a few paragraphs later) just as suitable for making iMovies and ripping CDs as the iMac or the eMac, for significantly less.

Removing optical drives? That may easily make the cMac less attractive, though even corporate users will want that capability. Overcrippling the cMac should be avoided at all costs. Besides, ingenious individual users could always add optical drives via FireWire, which would very probably stay part of the Corporate Mac: the ability to take work home on iPods could be a great selling point.

So, once a cMac is up and running, however badly crippled it is, it will still be an attractive computer for Mac-craving individuals on a budget, and there's little Apple could do to prevent that, apart from selling it with a Pentium processor inside and Windows XP installed.

The Perfect Client

What's left then? It has to be the "up and running" part, and here's where I might utter a tentative "bingo," were I much less shy and more self-assured. What if Apple can make sure that the cMac only boots up in a corporate environment? That is, on a network. Off an Xserve. If technically possible, it could be the right marketing move: Unless you mean serious business, you won't shell out $2,799 for a server just so you can save $300 on a desktop. If it comes to ten desktops, you're barely breaking even; but if you're a corporation that needs servers anyway, as well as several desktops, being talked into these net-bootable cMacs (henceforth: Xclients, following the XserveXcode naming scheme) would presumably be a much easier task than having the much more expensive iMacs or eMacs forced down your throat. Even figuratively speaking.

Apple does have a technology called NetBoot. that allows Macs to boot from a disk image stored on a server, even when the client Mac's hard disk is absent or damaged. (In fact, one suggested use of NetBoot is repairing a Mac's damaged HD.) Coming up with Macs that only boot off networked disk images should be a mere firmware issue; though that could be too tantalizing: if you're just a firmware hack away from booting up your $500 Mac, you might feel motivated to find that hack, be it the last hack you'll ever find. More extreme measures could include removing the cMac's hard drive: an early demo of Rhapsody (predecessor to Mac OS X) featured 50 iMacs, with their hard disks surgically removed, booting simultaneously off a blue-white G3 server.

That is not to say that a Business Mac without a HD would necessarily be a great idea. Mac OS X uses the hard disk extensively as virtual memory when RAM becomes insufficient, and with its double-buffered windowing model (where application windows are stored in memory at all times so they don't need to be always redrawn), memory does become insufficient fast. Case in point: the tiny Calculator application that ships with Panther may use only 6 megs of RAM (of the 768 on my machine), but its additional virtual memory needs are a whopping 110 (that's one hundred and ten) megabytes of hard disk space! If an Xclient had no HD, it would either need unreasonable amounts of RAM (pushing its price out of its target range by at least an order of magnitude), or, access a remote hard disk on a network for virtual memory needs, which can lead to performance degradation. And what if an ingenious user connects it to an external HD via FireWire?

So making a Mac only bootable off a server, but keeping it otherwise perfectly compatible, is quite a challenge. Moreover, it should possibly still run an unmodified version of Mac OS X, since Apple wouldn't be too keen on supporting several concurrent ones. (Note that Mac OS X Server is the same as the client version, with some added bells and whistles such as extra services and applications. On the other hand, an OS X version with its hard disk access code completely rewritten would do to consistency what the Hulk movie has done to Fathers' Day. It wouldn't be pretty.) Hardware features would also need to be selected very carefully: make the network-only Xclient too underpowered, and it won't be able to fulfill its functions. Make it too full-featured for its price, though, and the public will immediately see how much extra they're paying for their Macs. Tricky.

Despite all that, I'd still venture a guess that software-based crippling could be found, as well as the perfect balance of features. A new version of Mac OS X could identify the Xclient as such, and refuse to boot locally from (or even install itself to) that type of machine. With other Macs, the new OS X release would work as before. And, of course, that would be the only OS that the Xclient would be made capable of running. Making this solution hacker-proof, however, would be a necessity. Its HD (or other storage unit) could not be bootable, and it should preferably not even be able to store documents (more on that later). Basically, it would have a hard disk (of some sorts), but only for virtual memory and caching purposes. That is, unless Apple can afford the costs of putting a cop next to every such machine...

We don't know if Apple could perform all that tweaking, but it probably could: most of the technology is available today (in the current version of Mac OS X Server), except for the limitation bit. But should Apple do it? What kind of a computer would it end up producing? What would be its main selling points? Could it achieve anything other than angering non-enterprise users who'd get locked out of such a deal? I think Apple should go ahead and do it. It would be one solid machine. (Actually, more than one, and that's the point.) What follows is a brief outline of some potential benefits (i.e. selling points) that Apple's hypothetical network computer could offer.

Ease of Support

Building on the Mac's already legendary ease of use and the stability of Mac OS X, the Xclient could offer plenty of features that could make it an IT support dream machine (unless, of course, that support team is interested in more billable support hours). Head over to Apple's NetBoot page to read about the benefits of centrally managed desktops, including standardized installation (i.e. each user booting from the same system configuration), fast and easy recovering from any damage to (and user tweaking of) the system, or precluding such damages by limiting user access. Could IT support be any easier than that? An IT manager could (in fact, can even today) perform a complete reinstall of every employee's operating system in a matter of minutes, without leaving his or her room. Upgrading 500 desktops to a new OS X release should take about as long as installing it on one machine. Can you perhaps see any cost savings there?

Security

But it goes beyond that. If users' files are all stored on a server (i.e. the local HD, if any, is only used for caching and virtual memory purposes), then further benefits emerge. Not that Macs running the Unix-based OS X aren't already a great choice in security-conscious environments, but centralizing data storage takes data security one step further (provided that the central storage location doesn't happen to be in Microsoft's headquarters, of course). With security ensured by the server (which Mac OS X can actually provide, as opposed to some competitors), a desktop computer will contain absolutely no data (no documents, log files, or anything) after its user has logged off. Therefore, prospective data thieves will need to burgle their ways into heavily-guarded server rooms for physical access, instead of stealing employees' much more accessible desktop computers or hard disks. Setting up a network with these features is quite possible using today's Apple offerings, incidentally, so one wonders why corporations where data security is critical aren't flocking to similar solutions today. Could it be that they don't like the eMac's weight or the iMac's price tag?

User Benefits

As any user would be able to access his or her configuration from any Xclient on the same network, employees working in shifts, migrating between locations (or just getting their Xclients replaced, repaired, etc.) would just to sit down to any Xclient and use it as theirs. Logging on to their account, they will feel just like you do today when you sit down to your Mac and find it the way you last left it. They will share your current everyday experience of returning to a well-familiar system setup you've tweaked perhaps over the course of years. Everything is in place: your Desktop, your open folders, your "Recent Items" list, as well as all the various system settings, ranging from screen resolution and sound to language and date formats, not to mention the layout and contents of your file system, modification dates of your documents, your bookmarks, application preferences, fonts: your complete working environment. Integrate that with Fast User Switching, and Xclient users would be able to summon up "their Mac" on someone else's Xclient, with that person also remaining logged in.

Such techniques could, in the least, ease temporary computer shortage situations, where people are forced to share their desktops until a permanent solution is found: using an Xclient setup, all could still have their own "machines," and no files would need to be moved or copied between computers during the entire process. Who knows, it could even help breathe new life into the controversial alternative office arrangement concepts (such as "hoteling," where some employees in an organization have no fixed desks, but occupy available ones).

Conclusion

There's in fact nothing revolutionary about the above-mentioned ideas. Most of them exist on the Mac today, and many have existed on other platforms long ago. Where Apple could shine is in implementation, where it usually does: showing the world how a corporate network should work. Today, a corporation could buy Macs and create a working environment for its employees that surpasses any dominant Windows solution in ease of use, stability, security and maintenance costs. These all affect a company's bottom line, either directly or indirectly, yet corporations aren't rushing to the platform in huge numbers. The time should be right for such a migration, though: Windows is getting exposed as a closed, proprietary OS with new security holes discovered and exploited on a regular basis. Microsoft won't be able to cling on to its monopoly power forever, enforcing its own "standards" and twisting the arms of its customers when the rest of the world seems to move in the opposite direction.

Yet Apple still isn't an option most CIO would seriously consider. It's definitely partly caused by inertia, misinformation, FUD, and other intangible reasons. But the lack of a desktop computer in the "enterprise price range" definitely doesn't help either. Fighting misconceptions based on yesterday's Apple (an unstable, closed, antiquated OS running on expensive, non-standard hardware, manufactured by a loss-making corporate dinosaur) is inevitable in convincing corporate IT buyers to take a serious look at Apple and the numerous benefits it offers today. But while the continued operation of an Apple-based corporate IT system may be greatly beneficial and cost-effective, the initial purchase price is an obstacle many decision makers fail to look beyond. And it isn't just the price: there's little Apple offers between turbocharged, expensive powerhouses and exquisite consumer appliances. It focuses on creative professionals, well-to-do consumers leading a digital lifestyle, and educational institutions. But no Mac is currently positioned to corporations, perhaps partly for fear of cannibalized sales from Apple's traditional focus groups.

I believe the solution I've presented may help Apple better target the enterprise market, without jeopardizing its current niches. Its execution definitely seems feasible to me; most parts of the puzzle are already in place. Who knows, the Xclient may already exist as a prototype somewhere in Cupertino.

But then perhaps Apple will go ahead with a more risky strategy of simply releasing a $500 Mac to the wide public, profit margins and iMac sales be damned. Finally, perhaps Apple will try capturing enterprise sales with its current Mac line-up. In any case: you can't say I didn't warn you.

Note to Apple: if you do decide to manufacture Xclients, please don't send me any of those things. I could really use a 20" iMac, though. I know you could send me one.

- András Puiz

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