Let the hoopla begin (I guess including here).
In less than two weeks, around the Ides of March, Caesar…er, I mean Apple, will start selling the iPad 3. Just the announcement of the iPad announcement sent shares of Apple stock soaring past the $535/share mark, and Apple's already world's highest market cap broke the half trillion dollar ceiling – $90-plus billion more than ExxonMobil. Holy app store!
It took just 15 years for Apple to go from practically bankrupt to becoming the world's most valuable company. And in just two years, BlackBerry’s smart phone market share has slid to – well, that light at the end of RIM's tunnel is an oncoming train from Cupertino.
According to Nielsen, in 4Q 2011, the once dominant BlackBerry sold just six% of all smartphones. At the end of January, RIM co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie resigned. In the last month, two government agencies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) have decided to shift from BlackBerry to iPhone, joining hundreds of corporate switchers. An Apple enterprise adoption trend is transforming into a tsunami.
What happened?
iPad happened.
No, not iPhone, not even Android.
iPad.
By the end of 2010 –
the year iPad came out – BlackBerry's share had plummeted, while Android soared.
But I don't think the ascendance of Android – or even RIM's own technological sluggishness – is what condemned BlackBerry.
In little more than a year, iPad and iPad 2 were already seeing ferocious uptake in the enterprise markets. In mid-July 2011, Apple reported 86% of Fortune 500 companies were testing iPad.
iPad's corporate coup d'état was no accident. Out of public view, in the months leading up to the original iPad's introduction, Apple had carefully laid out a strategy for iPad in enterprise. Jobs & Company had learned an embarrassing lesson from Apple's corporate humiliation at the hands of IBM and MS-DOS, then Windows, a quarter century before.
One of Apple's primary problems in the 1980s was lack of vertical software. By the time Apple got around to addressing the corporate market, few software developers were willing to create specialized software for what had by then become a single digit percentage installed base.
Now, with iPad's and iPhone's half million apps, the vertical software shoe is on the other OS foot. And like Apple's obliviousness to IBM in the mid-1980s, RIM didn't recognize its app – and tablet – shortcoming until it was too late. No one expected iPad to be so successful and so no one was anywhere near prepared to react.
Apple's success with iPhone and iPad among corporate customers also is boosting Mac enterprise sales.
Apple's Mac success is immediately attributable to iPad's enterprise inroads.
As reported by Forbes, during its 4Q 2011
conference call in January, Apple CEO Tim Cook noted:
In the enterprise space, as an example, we've seen iPhones sort of be a catalyst, and the iPads moves after the iPhone. In several accounts, we've seen the Mac follow the iPhone. And so there are clear examples where one product has pulled the other in.
I don't disagree with Mr. Cook, but while iPhone introduced corporate users to iOS, I believe it was the iPad that sealed the deal. Further pushing the Apple ecosystem into enterprise is Cupertino's merging of its desktop and mobile operating systems, both now operating on an app model.
In short, Apple and iPad had out-enterprised former enterprise championship RIM. And around the Ides of March, the iPad 3 may deliver the corporate coup de grâce –
–
at least to BlackBerry. With Microsoft similarly matching its new Windows 8 desktop OS with its Windows Phone OS, Apple may have renewed corporate competition.
