Will Anyone Ever Catch-up To Apple?

While Sprint is laughing all the way to the bank a bit early, Apple is about to unveil what will almost undoubtedly be the 3G iPhone 2.0. Sprint thinks its laughing because its Instinct, announced earlier this year, will feature 3G and GPS, and they’ve made no bones about creating videos slamming the iPhone for lacking those features. I have a feeling, though, that Sprint has stopped laughing a long time ago, seeing as how Apple’s iPhone 2.0 should have both of those features and, ironically enough, before Sprint releases its Instinct. It makes you wonder why Sprint and other companies don’t adopt the same PR approach as Apple.

After all, what is the point of one-upping Apple when your efforts fall flat on their face anyway? I beg your pardon if I’m hammering at this point, but what purpose did it serve Sprint to pre-announce the Instinct as an iPhone killer? They must really feel like asses now, or at least they will come Monday when Jobs whips out yet another “One More Thing”. His Steveness, after all, has created a PR system which doesn’t talk, doesn’t proselytize, doesn’t dole out freebies to anyone who asks, and isn’t warm and fuzzy. Apple PR is cold, efficient, quiet, and very, very effective.

One of the largest and most captivating aspects of this Soviet Bloc-style PR defense is the huge amount of speculation and hoaxing which seems to swell enormously in advance of any Steve Jobs keynote address. This is yet another one of Apple’s greatest PR tricks. Each and every time a MacWorld Expo or WWDC rolls around, Apple is fed a huge number of ideas and concepts from some of the brightest minds in design; Apple’s rabid phanboiz. Do you honestly think it was chance that Apple was developing the iPhone for a few years, especially considering the ongoing interest in the Apple Newton line of PDAs?

It should have been made even more clear when Apple finally revealed that they had been developing the Intel version of Mac OS X alongside the PowerPC version the entire time. If that doesn’t clarify that Steve Jobs, his executive team, and the board don’t have their pulse on the future, I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t think it indicates an otherworldly precognition, but it does indicate a genius and aptitude for technology which none other appears to have. How, after all, do you explain the iPod phenomenon, Apple’s ridiculously rapid rise to sales parity with HP and Dell in the laptop market, their newfound dominance in the high-end workstation market, the iPhone taking a huge share of the smartphone market in less than a year, and their seeming ability to hit every single market they’ve targeted with a bullseye.

Okay. There’s one market they can’t seem to get right, no matter what they do (or don’t do, which may be more apropos); the enterprise server market. Right now, Apple is flailing around like Microsoft in the early days of Windows CE, trying deperately to find a way to seat itself in the market. Their current strategy is to make everyone believe that Mac servers are only for newbie dorks with SMBs who are seeking to improve the ease of use of their network. Fiddlesticks. That them thar is Unix, maties. Its been the single most powerful OS on the planet for over 30 years. Its no n00b toy, even if Apple has made it that way.

If I had my way, Apple would create a new division called Apple Enterprise and they would go head to head with the likes of HP and Dell, forging relationships with Cisco, Citrix, VMware, Foundry, EMC and a range of others to heave itself from the depths of the doldrums. They’re doing that with the iPhone ala 2.0 of the software, but that’s just for users. Apple really needs to offer a real end-to-end offering if they are to win back the world. I predict, at their current rate of halo adoption they will have 40% of the overall world market in 12-15 years. If they slam a homerun with a complete enterprise-grade backend, they could do that in half the time… as long as they honor Windows users with real security.

So, in reality, Apple appears to be playing a waiting game, or at the very least they are holding something big back in the server space that we can’t even imagine Apple doing. That, however, is just like the rest of their PR. We have no idea if they have something cooking back there, and I could simply be ignorant about thier plans for enterprise deployments. We’ll just have to wait and see, just like everything else. If Apple keeps this kind of PR going, it will end up being very, very unlikely that any other major player will be able to predict what Apple is doing. With that logic, its also extremely unlikely that others will catch up with or surpass Apple at any level.

Keep your eyes peeled for the kickass announcements at the WWDC. If you want to know what’s going on now, MacRumorsLive.com has the best feed. Load it and let it roll, Web 2.0 stylie, dawg. No need to reload the page.