NYT: Cook may be more enterprise-friendly than Jobs was

Tim Cook may not be the charismatic Apple CEO that the late Steve Jobs was, but at least to the business world, he's much more apt to meet and work with the chief information officers (C.I.O.'s) at enterprises than his predecessor ever was.

The New York Times reported today that Cook is "known to be far more at ease meeting with the C.I.O.'s Mr. Jobs once so memorably disparaged" by mentioning them as the gatekeepers in corporate "orifices." As TUAW readers may recall from the Apple Q4 Earnings Call on October 18, Apple now boasts of 92 percent of all Fortune 500 companies testing or deploying iPads, with the number jumping to 93 percent for iPhones.

The Times post quotes Rich Adduci of Boston Scientific, a medical device manufacturer that will have deployed 4,500 iPads to field sales people by the end of the year, as saying "What they've done in the past few years is really started thinking in a deeper way what the enterprise needs."

Some of the big enterprise wins that are described in the article include the deployment of 42,000 iPhones by Lowe's, 1,400 iPads for Alaska Airlines pilots, 11,000 iPads for the merged United and Continental Airlines, and an interesting use case for Siemens Energy technicians. Those techs climb 300-foot towers to service wind turbines and the company has found that the iPads are perfect for this work -- they're instantly on, they're light, and the cameras in the iPad 2 make it easy for the techs to send pictures to a tech support group. While only 350 techs currently have the devices, Siemens Energy expects to have about 5,000 within five years.

The post notes that Apple's secrecy about upcoming products tends to rankle corporate types, who want to see a five to ten year roadmap of where vendors intend to be. The companies that are making the best use of the Apple technology are aware of the fact that the company is "not an enterprise company."

Tim Cook has met with corporate customers more often than Jobs did, doesn't tend to insult those customers as Jobs did, and appreciates the needs of enterprises. But he doesn't deviate from Jobs' view that consumers are the priority for Apple.