Apple Visit Some folks from Apple came today to present at Chicago GSB. It was a good presentation, with a very nice turnout from both the computer science department and the business school. They also brought their new iMac, which everyone could ooh and ahh over afterwards. Nice.

Takeaways from the visit: Apple's abandoned their platform strategy and is now trying to be as good a Net citizen as it can while adding value to verticals. They're still struggling to be taken seriously by ISVs (and maybe the sales force isn't focused enough on this) and have no eyes towards the corporate market. This might be bad for Apple, as selling into MIS departments would be a big coup for them. But it's not clear how they would do this since low maintenance Macs just take power from MIS without giving them any control (at least with a Windows network, MIS guys are very needed). Locally served apps on the other hand give MIS power and low maintenance, so that might be something they would like. But why use high end hardware to display screen scrapes?

Next vertical: Silicon Graphics.