"Apple's made a lot of mistakes over the years." That's our official Understatement of the Week™, which we're getting out of the way right off the bat-- and now that it's been said, we'd like to posit that one of the bigger mistakes may have been trying to spread itself far too thin by going after market segments for which the company wasn't yet ready. If we recall correctly, back in the pre-Mac days, Apple had a pretty good lock on the education market, and a very healthy chunk of the home consumer market, too. Then the Mac debuted, and while it was billed as the computer for "the rest of us," its price tag sent "the rest of us" into sticker shock-- it definitely wasn't priced for home use. Instead, over time the Mac found its way into research situations, higher education, and the desktop publishing industry it helped to create. But Apple always kept lusting after the enterprise market, which was big and getting bigger. Remember those early Power Macintosh ad campaigns? It was the "Business Macintosh." But, of course, not many businesses were buying.

The really sad thing, of course, was seeing Apple trying so desperately to court the big business buyers that it really started to ignore the needs of the people who already were buying Macs. Schools and home users alike looked to cheaper Wintel systems as Apple's consumer models were neither inexpensive nor particularly compelling. (We never met a Performa we really did like-- some of the designs weren't bad, but price-performance ratios were pretty awful for cost-conscious shoppers.) And the lack of Mac games due to Apple's attempt to keep the Mac from looking like a "toy" wasn't helping anybody. Then, of course, once Apple hit rock bottom, Steve Jobs decided to ignore enterprise for the time being and recast the company as a consumer powerhouse, with the iMac and the iBook; meanwhile, the professional-level Macs are, for the most part, nice enough to prevent mass defection of the graphics industry to Windows NT. But plenty of folks still say Apple's never going to be more than a 10%-share niche player unless the company can successfully break into the enterprise market, and so far Steve and Co. aren't playing that game. At least, not publicly.

But here's the interesting thing: this might be the time for Apple to begin courting that difficult market once again. According to an article at TheStreet.com, businesses are already reconsidering the Macintosh as a possible enterprise platform. You need a paid subscription to read the full article, but luckily faithful viewer Mike Dominy was kind enough to give us the gist: apparently a company called Techtel, which tracks computer buying patterns, has discovered that businesses are "evaluating Apple products at a rate quadruple that of last quarter's." Interesting stuff, given the fact that those evaluations had dropped successively for the three previous quarters. So does Steve have anything up his sleeve to kick this unexpected business interest into overdrive? If he does, let's just hope that nothing taints Apple's newfound success with the Average Shmoe...