> Most employees aren’t accustomed to holding meetings with colleagues via videoconference and some have found it difficult to use Apple’s own offerings such as FaceTime, iCloud and iMessage, as they weren’t designed for enterprise users, according to current and former employees.
Hopefully this motivates them to make these products better! Although I'm not super hopeful.
I once asked a friend (and Apple employee) why Keynote doesn't have any collaboration function. I said, "Don't you guys every collaborate on presentations?" He said, "No, not really, and if you do, you're all in one room and one person is driving the computer".
So their culture is very much engrained with in person collaboration.
Edit: I should clarify that I asked him this a few years ago, before they added the "collaborate through iCloud" functionality.
The point still stands though, that while everyone else had collaboration in their presentation apps, Apple didn't, because they didn't see the need for it.
> Most employees aren’t accustomed to holding meetings with colleagues via videoconference
That was not my experience at all. Apple was so large that even in Cupertino it was more common than not to have at least one person, if not a whole team, in a meeting from a different location. Not to mention rainy days and flexible schedules because of the commute made it so videoconferencing was needed for almost every meeting I attended.
We have been using WebEx and Slack heavily and it's been working pretty well. We have a good culture of using iCloud to collaborate with documents and it really is a product which is dog-fooded thoroughly.
I obviously can't give you any specifics but I would say the transition to remote work has been a success so far and management has been using this time as an opportunity to showcase our autonomy.
Except of course for the big old 'Collaborate' button on Keynote's menu bar, where you can choose who should be able to edit or view the presentation - anyone with the link, or anyone you invited - mediated via iCloud.
To be fair it's a fairly recent addition - maybe in the last year or so.
> it was because they didn't understand the need for it
You keep making this claim but unless the person you knew was on the Keynote team I doubt they had any actual insight into the process.
There are a million things you could do. It is important to layout things in priority order. For example, unifying desktop and mobile implementations and file formats so when you do add collaboration features in the future the two can interoperate. Or adding a high-fidelity web experience so people who don't use your apps at all can collaborate. Perhaps those two things are important to get right before adding collaboration?
(Hypothetical, I don't have any knowledge of any of this).
Just discovered recently that keynote does have a collaboration function through iCloud. Was a little clunky to get going but is working great now. Not quite google docs but it does instantly sync across devices when you save
Hopefully Apple will enable multiple identities for apps as part of their new push for single signon. They recently added multiple device users for schools. Enterprise users can have per-app VPNs.
Ironically, because Google and Microsoft collaboration apps don't have iOS platform control, they are much more flexible in supporting multiple user identities.
There are many scenarios where information needs to be separated (projects, consultants, cross-org teams, OSS projects) and multiple identities are a proven means of separation and compliance. This needs to be possible without Enterprise MDM.
I think a big part of the problem here is the cultural adaption. There's the covid microcosm, and the multi-decade macrocosm. We still don't fully know how remote work should work.
That said, the various grades of "enterprise need" and patchy interoperability on stuff like texting & calling is kind of a travesty.
Hopefully this motivates them to make these products better! Although I'm not super hopeful.
I once asked a friend (and Apple employee) why Keynote doesn't have any collaboration function. I said, "Don't you guys every collaborate on presentations?" He said, "No, not really, and if you do, you're all in one room and one person is driving the computer".
So their culture is very much engrained with in person collaboration.
Edit: I should clarify that I asked him this a few years ago, before they added the "collaborate through iCloud" functionality.
The point still stands though, that while everyone else had collaboration in their presentation apps, Apple didn't, because they didn't see the need for it.