PDF of June 15, 2010 presentation slides: “Apple, where does it fit? And, why would you want it to?”

To find out how others would answer these questions, I started discussions within my LinkedIn Groups. From the various groups that I belong to, 18 members wrote responses about what they would say. I think you would find their answers informative.

However, I really did have my own take on Apple’s place on the tech landscape.

Starting with a couple of quotes, let me set the context for where I think Apple fits and why Apple’s role is important for all of us.

June 1, 2010, Steve Jobs: “The day is coming when only one out of every few people will need a traditional computer.

When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farms. Cars became more popular as cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic transmission became popular.

PCs are going to be like trucks, they are still going to be around, however, only one out of x people will need them.

Earlier this spring, in an article written for CNNMoney by Marc Benioff, Chairman of Salesforce.com, he described the changing arc of computing: “From mainframes (70s) to minicomputers (80s) to PCs and LANs (90s) to Cloud 1-the desktop Internet (2000s) to Cloud 2-the mobile Internet (2010+)”

Again, Marc Benioff, earlier this month: “We are moving from Cloud-1 (his definition: “Desktop Internet”) to Cloud-2 (his definition: “Mobile Internet”) and the iPad is the accelerator.”

So, if these guys are correct that the mainframe, desktop, and Cloud-1 Desktop Internet worlds will be over-shadowed by the Cloud-2 Mobile-Internet world, where does that leave me, as someone who supports Apple desktops and servers?

What will I need to know 3 – 5 years from now to be relevant in my business, or in the job market?

It won’t have anything to do with past wars between Desktop computing models.

Simply to say that I need to learn Cloud 2 skills, seems like once-upon-a-time, saying: “just learn MS Office”. That didn’t make you technologically relevant, it just kept low level workers from so quickly getting kicked out the door.

There have been three significant Apple events in the last 3 months.

The 271st piece of Apple targeted malware was released into the wild in April.

iPad sales produced more than 1 billion dollars in less than 60 days– do you know how many years it took HP to sell $1Bil in product?

Apple’s ‘enterprise value’ now equals Microsoft’s

This first event is notable to those of us doing Apple support. Many of these 271 malware are very old. They only continue to exist because Apple users have scoffed at the use of normal prophylactics! Often, Apple users just didn’t install anti-virus software.

For non-Apple support people, it demonstrates the robust longevity of UNIX. Consistently, it was made more and more robust. Apple OS X is one of four UNIX operating systems and OS X’s power, security, and command-line-interface rest on that UNIX history.

The second and third events speak to the earlier quotes from Jobs and Benioff. The computing world is entering a new phase. Are we ready for it? And, is it only a consumer phenomenon?

Isn’t Cloud-2, Mobile Internet, all about consuming, not producing?

What does an iPad have to do with creating economic value for a business?

And, what did Apple’s “Digital Hub” have to do with business, other than the marketing department having fun with it?

January 9, 2001, Steve Jobs announced  that Apple’s computers would be made the center of digital hubs, integrating all the digital devices that we were using, but that were not connected to each other or anything else: digital cameras, PDAs, camcorders, and DVD and CD players. (Reference: “The Dawn of Apple’s Dominance: Digital Hub Strategy, Revisited.” 2:51 am, January 27th, 2010, Pete Mortensen, The Cult of Mac)

Apple is a HARDWARE company, that also provides its own operating system, applications, cloud space, & marketing/vision.

Apple first maximizes this combination, as the basis for the digital hub– most dramatically with iMovie– a free Apple application, that together with a Mac and a camcorder and a .Mac account allowed the user to record, edit, and display a movie on the internet within minutes to hours, not days to weeks.

The Mac, as digital hub, integrated hardware devices and software. iTunes and DVD/CD Burners. iPhoto and Garage Band and iPod. Macs were designed to be the hub and other devices, software, and cloud resources were designed to be the spokes

The iPad, an applicance: My toaster has three controls: a slide-the-toast-down lever, a make-heat-stay-on-longer dial, and trap door to get rid of the debris. My refrigerator has two controls: a door to open or close, and a temperature dial to turn. When I open the door, I expect to see light and to feel coolness.

Some of us want our computers to be just as simple—we want them to hide the complexity and be the specific appliance we need at this moment.

Some of us don’t like computers, but we like our smart phones, which we don’t really think of as computers. Very seldom does your iPhone require someone like me to “fix it.” Seldom does it break. When it does, we reset it or take it in under warranty. There is little futzing with it. And we don’t think of it as a computer. Granted we mostly don’t use their full functionality, but neither do we do so with our computers.

Education and business work flows will very quickly be adapted for it. Imagine: a stack of iPads for registrants in line at an event. Pick one up, enter your registration info, throw it back on the stack, your name tag is printed out, you receive it from the registrar, and head on into the event. Consider: going to a car dealership, grabbing an iPad from the stack, selecting the picture of the car you wish to touch, selecting the features you want, and then being shown on the iPad a map to where on the lot a car like that is located. The salesperson gets a text message with the location of the car you went to see and meets you there. Or: you are referred to a doctor and when you arrive for your first appointment, instead of being given a clipboard with the stack of forms to fill out and sign, you are given an iPad on which to record your health history and sign away liability rights.

All of the above examples are single function uses, just like your toaster! They won’t eliminate the need for complex computing systems, for servers, virtual servers, and robust desktops, for processing and creating bulk data and exquisite graphics.

At this moment-in-time, Apple brings to the table something that  no one else quite does! …The User Experience!

I did not say, The User Interface. It is something much more than that, it is User-Experience.

Whether the original Apple IIe, or the Digital Hub of ten years ago, or the iPad of today, Apple’s focus is the feel of the “User Experience”.

Apples uses its control of hardware, operating system, applications, cloud services, and marketing message to create a pleasing “user experience”. People like their experience of them, it feels good, they feel empowered to do things…

So, where does Apple fit in business, into the enterprise environment?

Anywhere that the User Experience is important!

Anywhere that you wish employees to feel empowered.

And, sometimes in places where you wish to reduce support costs.

The world is not only multi-lingual and multi-cultural, its future computing environments are also best prepared for, when we acknowledge multi-platform.

Sometimes, Apple’s Total Cost of Ownership will be less than other computing choices, because users feel empowered and learn to handle more of their own computing issues and because of the tight integration between hardware and software that is only possible because Apple controls both.

It may not be secure and robust enough for your environment, but it is robust enough for use by NASA, secure enough for U.S. Army Intelligence and NSA, robust and secure enough, that earlier this year Google announced a switch to Apple computers, and it is robust enough to be used by astrophysicists and dna modeling scientists for grid computing.

And, as Jordan Zoot asked, “why is Apple a bigger threat to Google, than Microsoft is to Google?”

I can only guess that it is because Google believes that Apple is better prepared for the future, than Microsoft.

With the iPad at the hub, Apple is defining Mobile Computing. Whether iPads or Apple computers exist in ten years is irrelevant. They will have defined what follows them.

Are my current skills relevant? I asked that question earlier and it is still one that bugs me. I am trying to understand what skills sets I need in 3-5 years. I know that that is guessing. But simply relying on my current trajectory is also foolhardy.

For those of us doing Desktop Support, there will be fewer of us.

If you are a developer and you can learn to write very efficient small applications, there is a hugh demand for your skills.

Who really knows how prepared Apple corporation is to forge ahead without Steve Jobs. Is he building something bigger than his own vision. None of us really know.

Where does Apple fit and why would you want it to be there? (PDF of slide presentation.)

Apple products are for those setting where we desire a pleasing user experience.

You want it in those settings, because in the evolution of computing systems, Apple has defined the next step: connected integrative, but limited function, appliances like the iPad and user-pleasing experiences.

Does Apple pay me? “No.”

Do I sell Apple products? “No.”

And, do I drink the Apple “kool aide”? “Only once a year… except last year, twice. Oh, this year it was three times…”

“As an antidote, I use a Dell for running my business’ Quickbooks application. As an antidote to the Dell, I connect to Quickbooks from my Apple MacBook Pro running XP Pro SP 3 via Parallels’ virtual machine.

That’s all folks.

Hope you had a good ride and maybe some of this is true. Let me know your reactions.