SAN FRANCISCO: Steven P. Jobs never cared much for selling Apple products to big businesses. The late Apple chief executive so disliked the process of catering to the needs of business, rather than those of consumers, that he called chief information officers in corporations "orifices" at a conference in 2005. "There are 500 men and women in the Fortune 500 - CIOs - that you have to go through," Jobs said then. A funny thing happened, though, in the last few years. Big companies started buying Apple products - a lot of them - for their employees. The iPad and iPhone have given the Apple symbol a presence in workplaces that Apple never enjoyed when it was strictly focused on selling Macintosh computers. While corporate technology buyers say Apple does not try to hide the fact that consumers are still its top priority, they note that the company has gotten easier to work with in recent years, adding features to its devices that make them more palatable to business. It also doesn't hurt that Apple's new chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, is known to be far more at ease meeting with the CIOs Jobs once so memorably disparaged. "What they've done in the past few years is really started thinking in a deeper way what the enterprise needs," said Rich Adduci, chief information officer of Boston Scientific, a medical device manufacturer that has distributed about 3,000 iPads to its field sales people and expects to buy 1,500 more by the end of the year. 
Apple, which declined to comment for this article, has begun to drop hints that it sees the corporate market as a big growth opportunity. During recent earnings calls with Wall Street analysts, Apple executives have boasted about the portion of Fortune 500 companies testing or deploying iPads and iPhones - 92%and 93%, respectively, Apple said last month. "You never heard those stats before," said Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray. "The reason why is they struggled for decades, and finally they have a story to tell in the enterprise." Among the big customers Apple has won recently is the home improvement retailer Lowe's, which said it bought about 42,000 iPhones to be used by employees on store floors. Instead of having to find a computer, the employees can use the devices in store aisles to check inventory, pull up how-to videos and help customers estimate costs for painting, flooring and other projects. Airlines have begun to use iPads to replace the printed aircraft flight manuals, navigation charts and other material that pilots are required to bring on board. The binders holding those manuals typically had to be popped open every few weeks by pilots so they could replace pages with updated information. With iPads, the updating occurs electronically. All of Alaska Airlines' more than 1,400 pilots now have iPads, and United and Continental Airlines, which have merged, started giving iPads to all 11,000 of its pilots in August. "We've shown we can retrieve an electronic page faster than we can retrieve a printed manual," said Captain Joe Burns, a United pilot and managing director of technology and flight tests for the airline. The iPad, in some cases, is proving to be an attractive substitute for laptops in situations where portability and speedy access to information matters. Technicians for Siemens Energy, for example, routinely have to scale 300-foot towers to service wind turbines, sometimes in blistering heat in places like West Texas. Some of the technicians have been using laptops to read manuals and run through checklists when they're doing this work, but the devices are too bulky and take too long to boot up, said Tim Holt, chief executive of Service Renewables for Siemens Energy. Now the company is outfitting its wind service technicians with iPads, which are light, start instantly and have cameras that let workers send pictures to a technical support department if they need help troubleshooting an issue.

Hewlett-Packard unveils its first 'ultrabook' laptop
Nov 17, 2011
SOURCE : ET AGENCIES 

SAN FRANCISCO: Hewlett-Packard (HP) on Wednesday unveiled a lightweight laptop computer to take on Apple's MacBook Air in the hot "Ultrabook" arena. The HP Folio will be priced at $900 when it hits the market on December 7, less than two months after the California-based technology titan scuttled plans to abandon making personal computers. 
HP tailored the Folio for business, making it thin and light with a battery life of as long as nine hours. The Folio weighs 3.3 pounds (1.5 kilograms) and features solid state drives along with 13.3-inch (33.8-centimeter) high-definition screens. "This category of product breaks new ground and will be a likely choice for businesses to offer to employees looking for a more consumer-centric experience," said IDC chief research officer Crawford Del Prete. "We expect Ultrabooks will re-ignite interest in the small form factor PC category, and by 2015 expect 95 million Ultrabooks will be shipping worldwide annually," the industry analyst said. Folio laptops will be powered by Windows 7 operating systems, which promise to appeal to the broad array of businesses that rely on Microsoft software. A model of Folio will be available with a built-in security chip to encrypt and protect email and stored data, according to HP. HP's new chief executive Meg Whitman, the former chief executive of online auction giant eBay, said in October that the company will keep its PC division and also resume making tablets. 
Whitman's announcements were a dramatic repudiation of strategic decisions which led to the ouster of her predecessor, Leo Apotheker, after less than a year at the helm of the world's biggest computer maker. 
Apotheker, who was fired by HP's board in September, had proposed spinning off the PC unit and stopped production of the TouchPad, HP's rival to Apple's iPad, in a shift towards software and services for businesses.

Nokia plans to undercut Windows rivals with volume focus
Nov 17, 2011
SOURCE: ET Bureau

BARCELONA: Nokia plans to undercut its Windows Phone rivals to give its new smartphones a foothold in the market before trying to improve margins, its Chief Executive Stephen Elop said on Wednesday. 
Nokia unveiled a strategy shift to use Microsoft software on its smartphones in February in a bid to create a rival to Apple and Google's Android, and launched its first two models using it last month. 
Currently Nokia two new Windows Phone models are priced at 270 euros ($365) and 420 euros, excluding subsidies and taxes -- cheaper than most other Windows Phone models on the market -- but well above prices of mass-market Android devices which sell for 100-150 euros. "You see us pricing the devices so that that we can get what we think will be a good volume," Elop told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of an industry conference in Barcelona. Nokia hopes this will boost interest in the platform among consumers and developers, allowing the company later to focus on more differentiated models with higher profit margins. Windows Phone platform, used also by Nokia rivals Samsung Electronics and HTC, saw its market share shrinking to a mere 1.5 percent in the third quarter, according to research firm Gartner. At the same time market share of Google's Android platform more than doubled to 52.5 percent and Apple controlled 15 percent of the market. This week Nokia has started to sell its first Windows Phone model, the Lumia 800, in Germany, France and Britain. Earlier this week a survey of research firm IDC showed Microsoft's efforts to get back into the mobile game have impressed developers, and it has emerged as the third platform after Apple and Android. 
"What we hear from developers (is) they recognise the commitment we have made," Elop said. "We need to ship volume of devices to further attract them." Elop, who took over as the first non-Finnish chief executive of Nokia 14 months ago, has cut more than 10,000 jobs at the Nordic company which has struggled to battle mobile industry newcomers Google and Apple in the smartphone market. He said the company was shifting more into the constant improvement mode after major restructuring. "We are trying to shift more into the mode of finishing restructuring -- make sure people are well focused," he said.