Some 25 years ago, Steve Jobs and Apple lost the war of corporate computing to IBM and Microsoft. I imagine, though, that Jobs probably considers it just a battle in his own ?Thirty Years War? against Microsoft and its founder. While Apple's recent iPhone announcement was completely focused on consumers, the iPhone might also serve to bolster Apple's position in the enterprise.



At the start of the 1980s, Jobs was much more prominent than Bill Gates. And while he has outpaced Gates in the upscale consumer world, cracking the enterprise would likely bring Apple's co-founder great pleasure and finally ?end? the war.

Given the size of the mobile phone market, though, it makes perfect sense for Apple to take aim there rather than the enterprise. Apple claims that a mere 1% market share will result in sales of 10 million units in 2007. Given the hefty price tag of $599, though, many analysts reckon the potential market to be dramatically smaller. So what does this mean for the enterprise?

Well many enterprise road warriors love new toys and the iPhone is shaping up to be just that. Who knows how many Treo-toters or BlackBerry users will be drawn to it? Investors and analysts appear concerned as the stock of both Palm and RIM took hits immediately after Apple's announcements.

Unreported in any of the major press stories I saw were several less glamorous but positive developments for those interested in Apple as an enterprise offering.

While still officially a ?rumor? as I write this on Jan. 10, the new version of Apple's iWork suite is to include an Excel-compatible spreadsheet program. If this is the case, it would round out the core office suite.

Equally important, was Microsoft's Mac Business Unit's announcement of Office 2008 for Mac. While it won't be available at the same time as Office 2007 for Windows, it will come out this year. Most importantly, it will support the new, backwards-incompatible, file formats that Microsoft is introducing with Office 2007 for Windows. Microsoft is also offering a ?translator? that current Office 2004 for Mac users can use to work with documents saved in the new format.

Microsoft's continuing support of at least the three key office productivity programs at least allows Mac users to avoid being ?second-class? corporate citizens with respect to information flow. Still, Mac users are left without any Mac version of Microsoft's Access database program, and they still have to deal with Entourage.

Ah, Entourage 2004. When released it was billed as the ?new? Exchange client for Mac and it replaced Outlook 2001. While I never had the ?pleasure? of working with Outlook 2001, I think that it would have been more appropriate to combine pieces of each name ? ?Outrage 2004? would have been a more appropriate name.

With all due respect to the poor programmers who must toil away on this product, it is a pathetically poor substitute for the Outlook client available on Windows.

It is, in my opinion, the Achilles Heel of the entire Apple-in-the-Enterprise movement. Like it or not, Exchange is the core e-mail environment for businesses worldwide. BlackBerry, for example, tightly integrates with it to provide highly functional access to the Enterprise E-mail system.

While Apple's OS X ?Mail? application can communicate with Exchange, it provides only a subset of functions ? no scheduling, etc ? because it communicates via IMAP and does not implement the ?extra? features that Microsoft has built beyond IMAP.

With Apple Mail being the core e-mail client on the iPhone, Enterprise users might find the e-mail function wanting. If Apple chooses to build the missing functions, as Mirapoint has done, it could be a whole different story.