The Great Slog Over to the Mac

Many people have been asking about my use of a Mac these days.  Interestingly enough, this wandering over to Apple land has been really enlightening for me, as a Venture Capitalist.  Here are some of those thoughts. Remember, I'm filtering this as a Venture "is there a buck to be made" Capitalist and not a Mac vs. PC person.

Size matters

Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR)for the Mac has been impressive in North America. On college campuses, etc, lots of people are coming up with the money to buy a variation of the product.  I start to look at this from two perspectives, new purchases and people making the switch from one platform to the other.

Once I break down all this growth, I want to figure out where the opportunities are, if any, for me to turn a buck into ten.

Observation one: The "Nobody uses a Mac" refrain is starting to loose its place on the default answer list. Whereas two or three years ago, that probably worked in most VC pitches, today, you have to be a little more thoughtful about where/when/if the Mac might fit into your product strategy.  It might not, true, but the products have gained enough raw market share and market momentum, you can at least justify the time/expense of taking a look. 

Clearly web based applications/services along with things like Google Gears will make this argument possibly less relevant.  I will only observe that if you said "Mac is back" when it comes to the land of Venture Capital, I might not totally agree with you but I for sure wouldn't laugh you out of the office.

Pain = Opportunity (maybe)

Microsoft Office touts file compatibility across the platforms. For a new person, this is generally true. You can create a Word document and flip it to your PC buddy with (generally) no issues. Same with Excel and Power Point.  Generally.  I say generally because there are a number of 'ouch' points that business users will find. One example. Password protect a Power Point slide deck on the PC and guess who isn't going to read it? Exactly.

Then there are just some bad things. Entourage. For somebody new who buys a copy of Mac Office and loads up Entourage, you won't have many problems or issues.  Mac enthusiasts will tell you to just stay with the mail client that came with the Mac. They will be correct in telling you it is a great out of the box product, very well done. True, but Entourage plays well with Microsoft Office applications and does its thing when it comes to Microsoft Exchange.

All well and good until you talk to change or crossover types like what I am currently simulating.

Then you find that Entourage has such glaring flaws and WTFs in it that if I didn't know (like/respect) the Mac business unit head personally -Craig Eisler- I'd swear the conspiracy theorists were right. They think Microsoft deliberately makes the product bad to dissuade business IT departments from recommending it which in turns dissuades enterprise customers from starting to by Mac units in mass quantities. I don't think so.

The single bad thing? Backing up your mail folders. If you are an Outlook user, you know you can archive stuff based on folders, dates, etc.  In Outlook world, I only keep 30 days worth of sent mail on the server with the rest being archived off into a offline file. Company files that haven't been active for 4 months is another example. I do all of this to keep the active/working email set as small as possible.  Not on Entourage. This critical corporate/enterprise thing called archiving and back up is flawed (aka missing) from the product.  There are other items but this one is the biggest.

I recognize the platforms aren't the same and Outlook certainly is going to be Entourage nor the other way around. Still, basic functionality seems to be lacking in a product that is supposed to be for the enterprise which is just, at the very least, surprising.

And of course, what would life be without the obligatory dialog box showing an application, errrr, in a state of flux. 

From the ENGLISH version of Mac Office:

This could be an opportunity for you. Maybe. Build a better Outlook on the Mac that does a superior job of hooking into Exchange.  And here's the fun part: The Microsoft Exchange folks will help you and  'love you long time'. One of the beautiful things about big multi-product companies is the fierce independence of those units along side a serious desire to protect market share. If you create a product that means Exchange is going to keep seats, sell more seats, displace a Lotus Notes installation, etc, you are a bud.  Exchange is instrumented with API hooks into everything.  I've seen a number of open source mail clients that do an amazingly great job of talking to Exchange. Even Mac mail does a half baked attempt. 

The point here is that it might be an opportunity that years back didn't exist. That CAGR combined with some serious flaws/pain in products & migration, could possibly spell opportunities.

Observation Two:  It seems to me a software package that sits on the PC and analyzes what's gonna need to get done order to move -smoothly- over to a Mac could make some coin. Replicating directory trees (or explaining Mac land to the PC person), figuring out what programs you have on the PC and what you'll need to do those things over on the Mac; these are just some of the things a "welcome" package could do.

As an added bonus, you can do sponsored recommendations and placement ads, etc when the PC person goes hunting.  Again, you'd have to do the homework of CAGR of your target market and then figure out the numbers with respect to where the new users are coming from, how many, etc.

Might not be a VC investment but I'd buy a copy!

Living in somebody else's shoes, walking the walk, etc, is probably the fastest way to feel some pain and think up a solution. If you are right, lots of people will be feeling that pain and looking for your solution.

Comments

[pwb]

Two things:
1. I just quit a large company and joined a startup. I went from Windows & Office to Mac and Google Apps. It actually works fairly well and I am *much* happier from a computer perspective. Even our email runs through Gmail using our own domain.
2. I am always so irritated when people say that Mac Office *must* innovate over Windows Office. It's obviously the opposite. Windows and Mac Office should be interchangeable with feature parity (or as close as is possible). Entourage is completely insane. Why not MacOutlook?

[Martin Edic]

When I joined Techrigy I was the only Mac person in a room, full of Win programmers (I'm in marketing- big surprise right?). They were doing product demos via Webex. Only one problem: our target markets are PR and marketing agencies, many of whom are Apple people and Webex doesn't work on Macs. So we were losing demos because our otherwise smart people had not considered this- because they still lived in the 'everyone uses Windows' world. We switched to GoToMeeting which is fine for Mac-users on the receiving end but I can't do demos with my Mac- it's Win only for the presenter. Can companies ignore a platform that has 8% market share when they're getting started? Absolutely not because the Apple market for early adopters is much larger. And that where you enter the adoption curve.

[Partners in Grime]

The Mac users at our office are the only smiling computer users. They actually like using them!

[Bill Erickson]

I was at WWDC last week where they showed off the new version of OSX - Snow Leopard. They made it very clear that the ONLY new feature will be Exchange support. While I don't use Exchange (Google Apps guy), I think you'll like what they're doing with the new Mail, iCal and Address Book.