Apple iPad Gains in Business Market
Bloomberg reports that JPMorgan is going to supply its investment bankers with iPads. This cannot be good news for RIM, the manufacturers of Blackberry, as iPhones are starting to challenge Blackberries in their stronghold of business users.
Apple is building on its momentum in the tablet space, leveraging its 95 percent market share to expand from its traditional consumer base into the corporate market as RIM readies a rival device, the BlackBerry PlayBook. The Canadian maker of smartphones is trying to catch up with Apple as banks including Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse Group AG unveil applications for the iPad and Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. consider letting employees use iPhones instead of Wall Street’s 11-year-old device of choice, the BlackBerry.
In the early days of personal computing, Apple was dominant because, until the IBM PC came out, they were the only significant player for desktop computing. Business computing was based on main frames with dumb terminals. Remote users placed there telephone handsets in special units and connected over telephone lines to the mainframe or to timeshare machines.
With the introduction of the IBM PC, which was a much more open platform than Apple, the DOS and then the Windows platforms came to dominate office desktops.
Windows NT 4.0. which brought Windows into the network server world, further accelerated the process, as Apple never gained much of a foothold in business networking. This recent news story on server market share doesn’t even mention Apples.
Now, Apple may have found a way to worm back into the business world.