Company: Apple Computer
What it does: Apple makes PCs, smartphones and tablets that are fast, beautiful, work well and are simple to operate.
Why its disruptive: A decade ago, Apple was a struggling PC maker with the enterprise war all but won by Microsoft. In its fourth-quarter results released in October, 2002, CEO Steve Jobs had to report a net loss of $45 million. "Looking forward, we do not expect our industry to pick up anytime soon, though we’re hoping to help put a lot of iPods, iMacs and iBooks under trees this holiday season."
Enter the iPhone and the iPad and Apple has created one of the biggest shifts in enterprise history: the bring your own device (BYOD) phenom. Enterprises can no longer dictate to employees what tech tools to use and this is changing everything about how they operate.
Who gets hurts: Microsoft and its whole PC ecosystem, including HP and Dell. But also, enterprise software companies, as employees now want to choose their own tools and not just use what IT gives them.
Who else wins: iOS application developers, of course. But cloud startups like Box, Asana, Sunglass.io, Xobni, Qualtrics, Hootsuite also win, because the corporate user is choosing the application, often for mobile devices, and bringing it into the company and letting it spread virally from there.