The noteworthy Macworld Expo unfurled its computing charms this week, but the 27-year-old show about all things Apple has a nouveau business patina these days. Almost 75 percent of Apple’s historic Q1 sales came off mobile products. It’s a remarkable tally considering that was a $46 billion first quarter. Apple is not doing it on the backs of consumers exclusively. Business has embraced the Apple brand, not only in mobile but also on the enterprise’s desktops.
Although it’s diminished from its heyday of crowding both North and South Moscone Center exhibit halls — the whole thing has been in the more cozy Moscone West for two years — Macworld hovers near the 20,000 mark in attendance these days. A few hundred vendors make up the show floor this week, even though it’s thick with vendors of covers for any Apple product you can carry — which if you take a moment to consider it, becomes the bulk of the Apple line: ultra-slim laptops like the Macbook Air, beefier models like the Pro and the iPads and iPhones. All accomplished solutions, but there’s a growing number of companies that want to out-do Windows desktops here, and I’m not talking about Angry Birds on Windows Phone or MS Office. You can look beyond the common-cloth Unix choices if you’re making a migration and plan to buy off the shelf replacement software.
This year a new player entered this market with a software shell that makes Mac management as simple as administering Windows desktops. Mokafive integrates with those Mac systems so an admin with Windows experience — Active Directory, that sort of thing — can manage everything from a single screen. (That screen at left is on a Macbook Air.) After all, inside the heart of Apple’s products beats Unix, the original “open” system that’s supposed to connect with everything. Mokafive isn’t the only way to convince your IT staff that Macs won’t be any extra burden. There are other products aimed at creating a homongenous workplace for computers which tap corporate data.
Okay, full disclosure here: The companies I’ve worked for and founded since 1987 have been Apple shops. It used to be the domain of pariahs and the source of derisive snorts, but the Mac world has gone corporate on us all. The pro-sumer movement, where iPhones and iPads get carried into an enterprise by C-level officers, has brought along Macs as a sticky complement. In a report on the $46 billion quarter, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said nearly all of the Fortune 500 is using Apple’s products, including most companies adopting Macs. It used to be that a localized in-house datacenter kept Apple out. Now there’s cloud computing to take the place of vendor-specialized databases. For companies leaving the world of classic IT, this cloudy future is helping to make Apple’s business outlook brighter.
This being a computer conference, some things haven’t changed a bit since 1987. More than one vendor had hired “booth babes” — apologies to the female managers reading that phrase — to attract attention to one software package or another. A gaggle of these working women simply reminded me of the aisles of Uniforum 25 years ago, where men wearing parrots on shoulders at that Unix show shared space with women who might be modeling when they weren’t wearing mini-dresses festooned with booth numbers on their behinds. The difference was that Macworld 2012′s aisles and booths were rife with women working in more business-like garb, both buying as well as selling. One example was Mokafive’s COO Purnima Padmanaban.
Padmanaban is clear-eyed about the hurdles the Mac faces in IT strategy. “Corporations have trouble adopting Macs because while Macs are beautiful and sleek, but Windows applications don’t run on them, and it’s very hard to secure a Mac,” she said. “What we do is take your standard corporate Windows environment and make it a secure managed app on a Mac.” Using a concept that Intel calls Intelligent Desktop virtualization, it means that the Mac takes an equal but familiar place on the console for corporate computing, with Windows losing none of its compatibility with the likes of SQL Server or even a 3000-savvy database like Eloquence for Windows. Mokafive provisions corporate Windows environments for the Mac desktops. You free your users to bring in that Macbook Air they want to use on the job.
Another way to embrace Windows work on Apple’s products is through virtualization. While this doesn’t provide much of a single-pane administration benefit, the likes of VMWare’s Fusion or Parallels have advanced the cause of emulation. That’s the vehicle that’s carrying MPE into the future. Parallels can either present a Mac-like workspace on the desktop that’s completely outfitted with Windows as well. Or it can give a user the Windows experience by day and let them revert to Mac OS X off the job. There’s a lively competition between Fusion and Parallels that keeps each product improving at a constant rate. Both have gotten three major improvements in the last two years, and at $79 a desktop it’s too inexpensive to trigger even 3000-grade budget shock.
Managing virtualization requires some learning, but it’s a good skill set to acquire going into 2012. On the other hand, Padmanaban claimed that IT managers need “zero additional skills” to deploy and administer Mokafive’s Player, “an app that is running my standard Windows desktops.” She also says that deployment is possible in as little as 90 minutes. The software installation comes on a USB key.
As for the mobile goodies being displayed here, one software solution treats Windows as if it were running on iPads. Splashtop brings the Windows apps and desktops to the ultra-popular tablets by giving the user a remote control of their PCs. (Yes, that’s the usually-reviled but necessary Explorer browser in the picture, running on an iPad that’s controlling a PC remotely.) If an app can run on the PC, it can be used on an iPad. Because it’s an iOS app, the cost is crazy-cheap. This week Splashtop is $2.99 per iPad, and the regular price is only $19.95. I watched a demo that showed a PC desktop running while the iPad gave cursor control, text entry, clicks on buttons — any aspect of an interface required. It gets even better for remote use, because you can use it over a secured wi-fi environment from across the country. At the moment Google Mail somehow tells your desktop to talk to the remote app, since you sign in with a Gmail account on both iPad and PC. Google is far from perfect, but if its apps can be rolled out to the multi-billion dollar BBVA bank enterprise, it’s probably capable of managing the handshake between an iPad and a Windows PC.
Windows and the PC world never cared much about adopting Apple support in the decades where Microsoft had all the mojo. Coming from a humble position in the business world, the Apple solutions have a “can’t we all get along” approach. There are millions of Windows desktops out there. But there are now millions of Apple’s mobile customers bringing along Macs, a market that showed 26 percent growth over the last year versus zero for the rest of the PC industry. Apple products are going to become a management mission for the IT department, driven along by mobile attachments. Although Apple never aimed at becoming an enterprise darling, the business has arrived anyway. It delivers an user experience that can mimic Windows, or something newer and smoother and yes, popular — integrated with the Windows you already are using elsewhere in your business.
The makers of the PDF reader app Readdle showed a new app with a wider range of features at the recent Macworld. The new Remarks can do plenty of things — note-taking, free-hand drawing and PDF annotating. But what struck me the most was the perfection, it seemed, of the ability to rest your wrist on the iPad glass while you write or draw with a stylus. This is a tricky thing, I’ve learned during use of other apps. Somehow the Remarks app just sensed where I’d rest my rest while I toyed with the demo at the Readdle booth. No telling the app where you were writing, or having to stay inside a safe-zone area of the iPad with your wrist.
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