Apple Wants a Bigger Bite of the Small-Biz Market

When I buy stuff at my local Apple Store -- which I do quite often -- something's been happening lately that startled me at first.

Almost every time I whip my American Express out to pay, the store employee glances at it, notices that it's a corporate card, and then asks if I'm familiar with the services that Apple offers to business customers.

The question was surprising because Apple has long had a reputation as a company mostly interested in catering to the needs of consumers. Corporate America was an afterthought at best.

But times change.

Apple Gets Serious About Business

In May, Apple introduced Joint Venture, a flavor of Genius Bar support aimed at small businesses. Starting at $499 a year for up to five Macs, it includes support over the phone -- a perk that's unavailable to consumers -- plus loaner systems, help with software updates, and other benefits. Subscribers even get their own sites for scheduling service appointments and training sessions.

And Apple isn't the only company that wants to help companies buy Apple products. As I was perusing a recent issue of TIME -- a magazine I write for -- I came across a full-page ad from giant mail-order merchant CDW. It was devoted to listing 10 ways CDW can help make Apple products work in a business environment, ranging from customizing software and hardware configurations to performing authorized repairs.

A Logical Next Step

As I think about it, Apple's newfound interest in catering to businesses buyers is perfectly logical. Its intense focus on consumers stems from the period in the 1990s when it was in dire straits and it wasn't even clear that it had a future. When Steve Jobs returned in 1997 to the company he had co-founded, he saved it in part by ceding the business market to Microsoft. The strategy paid off in ways that even Jobs couldn't have predicted at the time.

Today's Apple, of course, is utterly unlike the shaky personal-computer company that Jobs rescued almost a decade and a half ago. The Mac's market share may still be tiny compared to Windows, but it's vibrantly healthy. Even some of makers of professional-strength software that abandoned the Mac in the past are back, such as Autodesk, which once again offers AutoCAD for the MacOS.

Small businesses that seriously compare Windows PCs and Macs may still decide to go the Microsoftian route: Windows-based machines will always offer more variety at lower prices, and there are still some holes in the Mac software library. (For example, I wish that Intuit's QuickBooks for the Mac was as meaty as its Windows counterpart.)  But there's no longer anything idiosyncratic about a small company deciding to buy and use Macs.

Mobile Makes the Difference

Still, the renewed strength of the Mac doesn't entirely explain Apple's resurgence as a seller to businesses. It's the iPhone and the iPad that have changed the game.

When Apple introduced the radically ambitious iPhone in 2007, it got a shot at prevailing in a platform war much like the PC battle that Microsoft had won so decisively in the 1990s. Apple never achieved a Microsoft-like monopoly position in smartphones -- actually Google's Android has surpassed it in terms of units shipped -- but its ecosystem remains second to none.

The iPhone has the most apps. It has the most hardware add-ons. Overall, it has the most reasons, big and small, to choose it over the competition (including that one-time business essential, RIM's BlackBerry).

And the iPad? Most estimates of its market share say that at least two-thirds of all tablets sold are iPads. In remarkably short order, businesses of all sorts have found all sorts of uses for it.

Rising to the Challenge

Those three strong products -- Mac, iPhone, iPad -- give Apple a portfolio of business tools that's even greater than the sum of its parts. It's a full-service technology provider with a vastly stronger story than in the days when it had to convince the world that a Mac was a plausible alternative to a Windows box. No other technology company is better prepared for the post-PC era that's just now beginning.

Mind you, that doesn't mean that Apple is going to find catering to business owners to be a cakewalk. Plenty of them are still are skeptical about the company and its products, sometimes for purely practical reasons and sometimes because old perceptions die hard.

But at least it's ready to begin the conversation. That's what its employees are doing every time they notice my credit card and treat me differently than they would a random consumer. And I'm really intrigued to see where this relationship between Apple and small business goes over the next few years.