[swartkrans]

NextStep was built with enterprise in mind but became wholly consumer in its next life as OS X and then iOS. The massive consumer success of the iPhone led to employers giving in to employees who wanted iOS devices instead of Blackberry devices, a phenomenon called BYOD, "bring your own device". BYOD has given rise to an entirely new Apple presence in enterprise which I think Apple is just getting started with. Prior to this Macs were used by designers and engineers, creators, but hardly the stuff of serious enterprise.

Right now the services Apple provides are all about fulfilling features that consumers want: email, cloud storage, being able to buy content, and apps. They're meant to augment and also perhaps cynically lock consumers into Apple's sphere. The hardware devices sold at high margins make the money. This may change, and we might also see a two Apples where apple starts selling its services with higher margins for enterprise.

Incidentally long ago Apple really dominated in education. Most of the 80's Apple IIes and macs were popular in K-12, but that went away in the later 90's. Now iOS, in the form of iPads, are making inroads in education once again, competing with Chromebooks. Education isn't enterprise, and I don't see any services Apple would offer schools, but it's related.

Almost every where you look though, Microsoft is under assault. I think the last remaining stronghold is the Windows PC workstation. I don't think Apple, Linux or Android have made any inroads here. I can see Chromebooks becoming more relevant in the future, but for now workstations are dominated by Windows and probably will be for the next decade. The enterprise level services Microsoft provides here with ActiveDirectory and sharepoint, and the sophisticated controls for deploying Windows workstations across big organizations is pretty unrivaled. Maybe RedHat is also in this space, but not at the level of Microsoft.

[bestham]

Just a nit pick, BYOD is when a employee brings his/her own device to work in order to use it to do work. At some places it's viable to let employees choose the tools that work best for them, and not force every employee onto the same 6 pound HP or Lenovo or Blackberry.

New and improved provision schemes will make this even more viable in the future, where applications and data that belongs to the employer can still be kept reasonably secure no matter who owns the hardware.

[Spearchucker]

It's an interesting area. I don't think BYOD has the rosy future the breathless posts on LinkedIn will have me believe. The problem is one of security. If I'm going to enforce security on a device I will need to wipe/reset the BYOD phone and apply my enterprise policy (password on start, device encryption, find-my-phone, remote wipe and so on).

At the other end of that equation you have a consumer who has a shiny new phone, and is being asked by her employer to yield control of the new shiny to the enterprise. Not appealing, when said consumer foots the bill for the phone, data and calls.

That conflict will result in CYOD (choose your own device), I think. And if we get a company phone, will mean we walk around with two phones. One fore work, locked down and able to access corporate email and SharePoint, the other for play, which has no corporate policy applied to it and only has Internet access.