Beyond Apples and Oranges

Corporate networks and Macs

Despite the built-in networking support in both the MacOS and the Macintosh box itself, Apple has had problems getting its networking effort connected. In Japan, though, where Apple enjoys double its worldwide market share, the situation looks hopeful.

by R.A. Lemos

Apple Japan is in a quandary. When companies in Japan look for a client/server solution, over 90% turn to non-Apple computers. With the ratio of networked computers now topping 13% in Japan, and growing, Apple needs to change the way users have traditionally viewed Macs if it is to succeed in the networked corporate environment.

In the past, most Apple networks have grown from well-established groups of the user-friendly computers, where coworkers find that they want to share data or use a centrally located database. But when a corporate IS (information systems) department designs a sales or database network, Macs sometimes may be considered as client terminals, but rarely ever as server solutions. Apple hopes that this mindset is beginning to change.

A well-connected lineage

Historically, Macs and networking have always gone hand-in-hand. The early Macs had the ability to connect to others of their kind through AppleTalk networks. With the extension of Ethernet capabilities in every Power Mac, Apple computer should have been able to keep up its appeal -- especially in Japan, where the Mac's support of long file names and international character sets has made Japanese network operating systems based on the Mac more reliable than their DOS/V-Windows 3.1 counterparts.

Why, then, has Apple not yet broken into the networking market? "Advanced networking has always been possible with the Mac," explains Apple Support Professional Glen Harada, "yet, we have had trouble getting the word out [to the customers]." It's a familiar story; most pundits blame Apple's chaotic marketing for not pushing developers and system integrators on the benefits of the little beige box. Having a strong market share helps, and Apple's current 9% of the world market is weak enough to worry many network developers. Licensing the OS might have helped, and now that Apple has shifted its licensing program into gear, its share of the network market may improve.

Apple's biggest mistake in the networking market, though, was its monolithic approach to interoperability. Apple relied for a great while on a proprietary network protocol: AppleTalk.

This has changed over the past few years. Macs now can be set up to work with other machines fairly easily (via LocalTalk, Ethernet, and/or Token Ring networks running a variety of network operating systems). In the future, with the push toward the Open Transport Communications Architecture to add standardized network communications, developing network software for Macs will become even simpler. And, under the Common Hardware Reference Platform (developed jointly with IBM and Motorola), the Power Mac's PowerPC processor has a decent chance of replacing the aging Intel architecture.

Hanging from the technical tree

If the race were based on technology, Apple would have already beaten the elephantine Microsoft Windows OS. Every Macintosh can network out of the box: just connect to one or more Macs with a LocalTalk cable, and the Mac's AppleTalk protocol gives the network the ability to share files and applications. While LocalTalk is only about one-sixth as fast as Ethernet, today's Power Macs come with Ethernet and token-ring support: add a transceiver and cable and the network is up and running. By requiring similar support from the newly signed Mac-compatible vendors (like Pioneer), Apple assures that every Mac-compatible sold has at least minimal network capabilities.

Yet, most people have a poor view of AppleTalk (the Mac OS's protocol) and AppleShare (Apple's homegrown networking components of the MacOS). In the past, sparse functionality, lack of security, and poor scaleability convinced most network users that the Mac solution was for beginners only. The system changed with System 7 -- but the public's opinion did not. While keeping its ease of use, AppleShare has improved network management and security functions, and it supports interconnection with any other kind of computer running the AppleTalk protocol. Yet, Apple has been lax in exhibiting the solid and secure network operating system demanded by critics.

In Japan -- as Apple's larger market share may indicate -- ease-of-use may be more important than functionality. In addition, the Macintosh has several advantages over DOS/V-based networking in Japanese. This is in large part due to Apple's support of an international solution from the beginning. Because Japanese filenames are not supported by DOS naming conventions, the mixing and matching of DOS and DOS/V (Japanese-capable DOS) will often bring down the network. On the other hand, a Macintosh network (even one running under NetWare for the Macintosh) can gracefully handle bilingual clients and programs.

Working together

Even though it has been losing the OS battle to the DOS/V-Windows 3.1 duo here, compared to the US, the MacOS has been a hit in Japanese business sectors. Over 60% of Apple Japan's sales are reported to be into the corporate sector; NTT, for example, has bought over 20,000 Apple computers. Most of the computers have gone to vertical (specialized niche) markets; Apple Japan claims to have about 40% of the computer sales to doctors and university hospitals, and over 20% of the sales to construction companies. In Japan, Apple's 18% of the market and the Mac's ease-of-use could edge any worry from the minds of potential corporate customers. Programs such as Apple's Corporate User Party (Apple-CUP) are designed to help the process.

For most business organizations, networking will start with collaboration (the Apple-esque term for connecting computers so that people can work together by exchanging data, sending e-mail, and using each other's applications). This way of working treats all network members as peers (that is, of equal status), and so is called peer-to-peer networking. For workgroups and small companies, peer-to-peer computing is an efficient way to share resources.

Yet, Novell and Microsoft are touting client/server computing as the be-all and end-all of networking, relegating peer-to-peer collaboration to a user-friendly niche. Applications where the data needs to be centrally located (any kind of relational database, some scheduling applications, or an analytical database), benefit from a client/server solution's central handling of security, backups, and other administration issues. However, the Mac OS (nominally a peer-to-peer collaborative environment) easily handles a central server.

To Apple's credit, it has not dropped the collaborative paradigm; rather, the company is working hard to extend it. A major step was taken in Japan with the announcement by NTT of a video conferencing and collaboration system built on Quicktime Video Conferencing. The system promises to let telecommuting coworkers hold videoconferences over ISDN lines and work together on a single document. With the capability of onscreen drawing (the so-called "whiteboard" function) and 10- to 15-frame per second videoconferencing, the system becomes a reasonable solution for corporate managers and telecommuters. Yet, Apple is not alone in this; the competition is attempting to divide up its pie, as Compaq and PictureTel have created a similar system for the DOS/V-Windows 3.1 user.

For many computer users, collaboration has been and will be the future of networking. However, certain corporate problems, such as "mission critical" applications like transactional databases, do not fit into the collaboration picture. For these applications, client/server networks will remain the best solution. Apple hopes to fit in here, too.

Serving up an Apple

DOS/V computers have the lion's share of the Japanese business market, which makes AT-compatible PCs a shoo-in for client-terminal applications. On the server side, the 680x0 Macs can't compete with the more powerful SPARC servers (though the 68040s tried). And, a lack of business software for the Mac has plagued Apple's efforts at pushing the system as a connectivity solution. Marketing Manager Nagashima of Intrigue Corp., a Mac-only system integrator, agrees that, "Apple's biggest problem, until recently, was the lack of off-the-shelf solutions."

Yet, these problems led Apple to build better systems. "Apple has worked on creating a strong development system," continues Nagashima, "an environment that lets system integrators create custom solutions extremely quickly and easily." And Apple Japan has improved in other areas as well: the price-performance of the Power Mac system has shown its competitiveness against the more powerful (but much more expensive) workstation/server solutions.

Indeed, one of Intrigue's largest clients has a company-wide LAN/WAN solution consisting of 2,000 Macs integrated with 1,000 Windows machines. Every member of the company has a computer on their desk, with Apple Workgroup Servers managing schedules, overtime, and e-mail. Access with the two IBM databases, running Oracle and DB2, respectively, is easily