Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of welcoming Alykhan Jetha, CEO of Marketcircle, Inc., on a recent episode of the tech show. As someone who develops software for small businesses, AJ said that Apple shouldn’t really waste time and money trying to grab enterprise customers.

This goes against the conventional wisdom, that Apple is making a huge mistake not going after big business, except, of course, for school systems, where they’ve traditionally done pretty well.

If you believe what some tech writers have claimed, IT people around the world are all set to be wined and dined by Apple, so they can ditch the dreaded Windows albatross forever. But it’s really not that simple, and getting involved in pushing hard to build a large business portfolio may be a bad thing for Apple, although some third-party dealers are definitely trying.

Now I want Apple to succeed big time as much as anyone, but at what cost?

You see lots of businesses merely want cheap boxes to run their usually customized applications. They aren’t impressed by Apple’s specialty for superior fit and finish and find the serious limitations in configuration options to be a real negative. A large concern may expect Apple to ditch iLife, toss the Apple Remote, the built-in Web cam and other fancy features that consumers and small businesses crave, but the enterprise detests. Forget about having toys for employees to goof off during working hours. It’s all about the money.

When Dell and HP come calling, they are only willing to sell a company tens of thousands of cheap boxes equipped precisely as specified, no exceptions. Apple has traditionally not done that, although they have made some concessions for the educational market with such products as the late eMac.

Standardization also works against innovation. Yes, Microsoft may own the business market, but at what cost? Consider how many billions they have to spend on their products to retain backwards compatibility, for example. Besides, much of the growth in the business sector happens with smaller companies. Apple and Google are the exceptions that prove the rule.

This doesn’t mean that the enterprise isn’t getting Macs anyway. They often come through the back door, or perhaps the creative departments, where fiercely independent artists require their Macs. So the IT people may be forced to work on them, even if they doing it kicking and screaming to the very end.

The other entrance-way for Macs and other Apple products is the executive suite. As a company’s leadership acquires a Mac and now an iPhone for their homes, they often go to their technology people and insist they find a way to integrate those products with their office networks. Here’s where the magic happens.

Yes, there are exceptions to the rule, but recent versions of Mac OS X have all been designed to play nicely with multiplatform networks. You should be able to share files with your Windows counterparts with little difficulty. Even the infamous Exchange collaboration servers are getting better and better Mac support. The Leopard version of Mail makes it easier to access Exchange mail, and Microsoft has reportedly grafted improved support into Entourage 2008, which will be released in mid-January.

The iPhone? Well, it uses iTunes to sync your contacts and update software, and that operates on both the Mac and Windows platforms. Yes, there’s work to be done to integrate the iPhone with enterprise mail systems, but that will come, particularly after Apple’s software development kit appears in February.

Yes, it’s true that Apple isn’t making overt overtures to big business. But they’re still getting in, even if the route is more circuitous, and that’s a good thing.

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The other day I heard from a long-time friend, a former member of a forum I managed on AOL way back when. He has an engineering degree, and worked for many years as the chief sound engineer for a famous singer (now deceased), so he definitely knows his hardware.

He’s also a Mac loyalist, and has earned his stripes by working with Apple’s hardware and software from the earliest days. In all fairness, some of his experiences are stellar, which is why he continues to use Macs. But he’s had his share of problems too, and lately he’s been keeping tags on Leopard’s rough edges.

Rough edges?

Didn’t I say in an earlier column that my experiences with Leopard have been terrific? Indeed I have. And, despite the fact that Apple’s own discussion forums and those Mac troubleshooting sites are littered with hundreds of reports of anomalous behavior, system crashes, and performance issues covering a host of setups, little has been nailed down so far.

So what are we to suppose here? I have been suggesting that many of the problems may be traced to third-party products, both hardware and software, and their interactions with Leopard. Either way, application and driver updates ought to set things right, assuming that Apple doesn’t have to do its part as well.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

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The other day, after my son returned from his semester of college studies in Spain, I watched as he set up his well-worn 17-inch PowerBook G4 on his desk. That particular form factor actually debuted in 2003, and Grayson’s notebook, the 1.33GHz model, appeared in the spring of 2004. My 17-inch MacBook Pro was acquired in May 2006.

Why do I mention this? Well, unless you put the two side by side and look carefully, you will be hard-pressed to see any difference, and the latest MacBook Pros are pretty much the same. No, you don’t have to remind me of the tiny dimensional differences and all that. That’s not important. It’s the overall form factor, which remains unaltered.

Some tech pundits speculated that, in switching to Intel processors, Apple would take the opportunity to revitalize the case designs for all or most of their computers. That didn’t happen. While the internal layouts may have been altered to accommodate the new processor family — and this is particularly true with the Mac Pro where internal hard drive bays were doubled — they are otherwise hard to identify from their predecessors.

Now I realize it has been suggested that Apple retained the old designs to signify continuity, retaining a positive brand identification through processor switches, as if to demonstrate that it’s not important what’s inside. What counts is how well the computer performs and the value it offers to you.

That makes sense, and I’m inclined to go along with that viewpoint. Sure, it has also been suggested that Apple had spent a huge sum just in switching processor architectures, and revising form factors might have raised development costs considerably, but, now that Apple is beginning is third year of the Intel transition, isn’t it high time something change in the way Macs look?

Yes, you can cite the iMac as the harbinger of change, but remember that the basic shape is the same. It’s just a different case for the most part. Besides, Apple’s displays acquired aluminum first.

Now one of the more popular rumors is that Apple is developing a thin and light notebook for early 2008 introduction, perhaps during the Steve Jobs Macworld keynote in January. Sure, if you repeat a rumor often enough, it might even come true. Witness the iPhone, a product that had been touted by rumor sites for a number of years before it became a reality.

Of course, a tiny notebook isn’t new to Apple. Consider the PowerBook 2400 series, and even the 12-inch PowerBook G4 as examples of small portables that had some measure of success.

Thin and light also generally means well below five pounds in weight, so where would Apple take the space from if it decided to keep a fairly decent-sized LCD display, say in the arena of 12 or 13 inches?

Sure, miniaturization has taken a huge leap since the first aluminum PowerBooks appeared. It’s also possible that Apple might shave additional space by using Flash memory for all or part of its new notebook’s storage system. However, it won’t come cheap, and the size you might select as reasonably space and price efficient, 64GB, is a mite slim for today’s notebooks. Of course, if the product came equipped for an external docking station with additional desktop storage, that might compensate.

The advantage of Flash memory would also mean greater battery life, not to mention the fact that Intel’s latest chips are also more efficient in their use of current.

But would a tiny entrant in Apple’s notebook line be essentially a slimmed down MacBook Pro, thus keeping a similar aluminum case design, or represent something else altogether? Besides, how many design choices do you have for a notebook computer, other than using different components for the case and maybe moving speakers, the keyboard and trackpad around a little? Would Apple revert to Titanium, which wasn’t such a great choice because of the tendency to scratch and bend when it was used in the PowerBook? Or stick with aluminum and play the color game to give you the illusion of a difference?

What about other ingredients of a notebook, such as a track button in the fashion of the IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad?  Is that a practical input device, or just a gimmick? What about a second mouse button to accept the reality that an Apple notebook may also be the most effective way to run Windows too? Besides, Mac OS X readily accepts multi-button mice, and don’t forget Mighty Mouse.

Whether or not Apple makes its notebooks smaller, would they also be encouraged to dicker with the case designs for other products, such as the Mac Pro? Do you care whether your professional desktop workstation has a case that reminds you of a cheese grater, or is it just a matter of design efficiency? After all, the openings do help the internal cooling system, right?

Would Apple at this point revert to plastics to cut weight, or are we past that now?

There is one other factor to consider: There’s been no significant change in the designs of Windows notebooks, other than varying color schemes here and there, and Apple’s taking a bigger and bigger share of the portable computer market. So what’s to change?

Unless, of course, Apple wants to take computer design into a new direction. And that, my friends, may be the development even the rumor sites haven’t yet talked much about. Of course, this column may inspire them, but I’m more interested in whether the possibilities inspire you, the reader.

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