With the iPhone hitting stores, Apple will be raking in the greenbacks. Now the company is getting the thumbs up from Greenpeace.

Just the other day I was teasing Apple for getting rotten grades from environmental watchdogs like Climate Counts and Greenpeace. These groups were saying Apple was doing next to nothing about reducing the harm it does to the environment with its manufacturing operation and the energy its products consume.

Well, now Greenpeace is saying Apple has turned over a new leaf. A personal letter from Apple founder Steve Jobs on the company’s Web site stated that the company’s “stakeholders” [read: environmentally conscious customers] “want us to be a leader in this area.”

In the letter, Jobs said he has been investigating Apple’s current practices and progress toward becoming more eco-friendly. He said he was “surprised to learn that in many cases Apple is ahead of, or will soon be ahead of, most of its competitors in these areas.”

Basically, Jobs provided a rundown of the toxic chemicals Apple will be phasing out of its products by 2008 and how it’s trying to promote recycling of its old products.

Greenpeace is pleased by this announcement, but the organization noted that “it’s not everything we asked for.” Apple will accept old products from customers in the United States for recycling, but Apple isn’t extending that policy internationally yet. Other companies do recycle their products globally, Greenpeace said.

Also, this Apple announcement addresses the complaints from Greenpeace about toxic chemicals. But there is still work to be done. Climate Counts, with its scorecards, has noted that Apple still has to address the amount of greenhouse gases its products contribute to the environment. Jobs’ open letter on Apple’s Web site says he’ll be sharing more on that issue later this year, maybe. Until then, Apple has a little more work to do.

Though most of you are probably reading this blog post on an HP or Dell system, a growing minority of you are lapping up my words of wisdom on an Apple machine. That’s because Apple’s share of the desktop/laptop market grew more than 100% over the last year thanks in part to its success in the SMB segment, according to new research from AMI-Partners. 

The report found that among small businesses, which AMI defines as those with between one and 99 employees, Apple increased its desktop market share to 12% from 7% and its share of the notebook market to 8% from 5%, both on a year-over-year basis. 

Even better for Apple was its growth among medium-sized businesses (orgs with between 100 and 999 workers, as defined by AMI), upping its desktop market share to 27% from 13% and its notebook market share to 18% from 8%, again on a year-over-year basis. 

AMI credits Apple’s rise in the SMB segment to its “recent launch of the industry’s first-ever backlit LED screen for Mac Pro” and the allure of the Mac OS X Tiger, “which supports multiple OSs, including Windows, on a single platform,” among other reasons. 

Still, Apple’s overall share of the desktop/laptop market remains relatively small.  

A Piper Jaffray analyst estimated last December that Apple’s piece of the PC pie then stood at around 3%, with only modest growth expected for 2007.  

Now, I’m not sure if by “PC market” Piper Jaffray was referring to just desktops or desktops and laptops. Either way, Apple’s market share is still small change compared with the aforementioned HP and Dell, which own 19% and 15% of the overall desktop/laptop market, respectively. 

Clearly, Apple still has a long way to go, but it has to be encouraged by these latest SMB numbers. Whether Apple can maintain its momentum and eventually make headway in the overall desktop/laptop market will be interesting to watch. 

On another topic, Apple is also making headlines this week, you may have heard, thanks to the debut of something called the iPhone.

It’s not easy being green. Even for Apple. Climate Counts, a nonprofit group funded by organic food company Stonyfield Farm Inc., has released its annual “scorecards,” which examine how companies are working to be more environmentally friendly. 

Climate Counts rates companies on a scale of one to 100, based on 22 criteria that examine whether companies are measuring their “climate footprints,” reducing their impact on global warming, supporting progressive climate legislation and publicly disclosing their progress in these areas. 

Apple Inc. received the lowest score of the electronics companies reviewed. Just two points out of a possible 100. I’ve had the displeasure of watching far too many of those “Hi, I’m a Mac. And I’m a PC” commercials. The actor playing the Mac is the young hip guy. It’s the PC who is the stodgy, older fellow who is afraid of change. And Apple has also brought us the iPod, which a fine piece of consumerism that every hipster has clipped on his or her hip.  

So why isn’t Apple, the company with all the hip products, “with it” on climate change? It received an anemic total of two points for its stated intention to review the overall impact its products have on global warming and its plan to release the data later this year.  Compare that with IBM, which scored the highest among the IT vendors reviewed with 70 points. Toshiba followed with 66 points. Hewlett-Packard received 59 points, and Dell was in the middle of the pack with 41. Canon, better known for cameras, printer and copiers, led all electronics firms with 77 points. 

Apple has been repeatedly dumped on for its environmental policy. Greenpeace has launched a campaign, Green My Apple, specifically targeted at forcing Apple to become more environmentally friendly. Apple does have a page on its Web site that describes what the company is doing to be more environmentally friendly. But apparently its efforts haven’t impressed.  

In a separate category for Internet and software companies, eBay and Amazon.com stunk up the joint, with two and zero points respectively. Yahoo led the category with 36 points, followed by Microsoft with 31. Google, the ubiquitous search and online application behemoth, scored a middling 17 points. Google’s mediocre score promises to rise simply by virtue of the extremely ambitious announcement it made this week. Google said it will make itself carbon neutral by the end of this year.  As reported by GreenBiz.com: 

“In an announcement made this afternoon, the company said it had calculated the total amount of its GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions through operations, employee commuting and business travel, construction and the manufacturing of its servers. Tallying the carbon footprint is Google’s first step in its mission to reduce and offset all its GHG emissions.” 

This is promising news from Google, but as Foreign Policy blogger Prerna Mankad pointed out: 

“Sergey Brin and Larry Page may want to reconsider jetting around in their personal Boeing 767.”  

In other words, Google’s billionaire executives might want to lead by example.

Are the big IT vendors still in the dark when it comes to the SMB market? Illuminata analyst Wayne Kernochan thinks so.  

I think Kernochan is right on when he says that creating SMB-specific software and applications isn’t just a matter of scaling down existing enterprise-level apps. 

Rather, software and apps for SMBs should be developed from the ground up with the specific needs of SMBs – simple to use, easy to administer, yet powerful enough to get the job done, as Kernochan told InternetNews.com — as the focus.

Let’s hope the major IT vendors get the message.

After the keynotes at Enterprise 2.0 yesterday, I had an interesting discussion with Anant Jhingran of IBM that I thought I’d pass on. 

Considering that the majority of vendors here at the conference are startups or at least relatively young, I wanted to find out what role an established company like IBM sees itself playing in a Web 2.0 world. 

Anant told me that he thinks an important consideration of Web 2.0 that is sometimes overlooked is integration with existing technologies. You must “live with the old as you embrace the new,” as Anant put it.

Picking up on McAfee’s point that Web 2.0 requires giving up some measure of control, Anant said an experienced company like IBM is better able to help customers integrate collaboration technologies into existing infrastructures while maintaining adequate levels of security and compliance. 

True or not, giving employees the benefits of Web 2.0 while maintaining some measure of control on IT’s part was one of the hot topics yesterday. I also spoke with some reps of BEA Systems, and they stressed it as well. I think this is another sign that Web 2.0, though still in its infancy in many ways, is showing signs of maturing.

Forrester Research is advising telecoms to offer SMBs everything under the sun.OK, that’s an exaggeration, but in a new research note, senior analyst Michele Pelino advised telecoms to start offering value-added services in order to grow their SMB business. In a recent survey, Forrester found that about 77% of 793 SMBs surveyed buy bundled telecommunications services from their providers. Twenty-three percent purchase local and long-distance voice bundles; 35% buy local, long-distance and broadband Internet access bundles; and 19% bundle local, long-distance, broadband and wireless voice.  Once a provider reaches the point of selling a so-called “quad-play” bundle (a combination of local and long-distance voice, broadband Internet and wireless voice) to an SMB customer, how does it grow its revenue from that SMB? The answer is value-added services. 

Pelino is predicting that telecoms will begin offering Web site hosting, email services, security services and general Software as a Service (SaaS) technology. To some extent, this is already happening. For instance, I reported two weeks ago that XO Communications will offer a variety of SaaS technology to its telecom customers. Forrester’s survey found that 13% of SMBs that buy bundled telecom services are interested in value-added offerings, but Pelino said the potential market for them is even bigger. 

“I think the thing is with SMBs, if you say, ‘Do you need X, Y and Z services,’ they say no,” Pelino said. “But do they know the value that potential service would bring to the table? This snapshot of SMBs that already subscribe to bundles shows that some SMBs recognize this and are interested in value-added services. But it also shows that there is an education process that needs to happen.” 

Yes, vendors need to educate SMBs. But SMBs should also educate themselves. If they’re going to buy mission-critical IT functions as services from their telecom provider, they need to know how to assess the quality of those services. When XO Communications announced its SaaS strategy, it partnered with Jamcracker, an aggregator of SaaS technology that analysts told me was a quality player in the market.  

Pelino’s research also found that price isn’t the only reason SMBs prefer to buy bundled telecom services — although it remains a top issue. While 87% of SMBs that use bundled services said that price benefit is important or very important, accountability from one company was a close second, with 81% saying it was important. And the convenience of dealing with only one carrier was important to 75% of them.  

“The accountability issue hits on the fact that SMBs oftentimes when they use multiple vendors without the bundled scenario — it’s very difficult for them to know who to call and figure out what the problem might be,” Pelino said. “There might be four different points of contact, and then who do you call? With the bundled scenario, there is one point of accountability. Then behind the scenes, it’s the vendor’s job to figure out what to do.” 

So making things simple seems to be a driver for SMBs to get everything from one provider. But sometimes that convenience can come with a cost. An SMB’s telecom provider won’t typically be a trusted brand for information security. Who will these telecoms partner with to deliver these value-added services? SMBs need to educate themselves about this technology before they commit to expanding their relationships with their telecom provider.    

Speaking at the Enterprise 2.0 conference today, Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee hit upon an important point that I think partly explains why IT departments have yet to adopt Web 2.0 technologies on a wide scale: people power. 

McAfee correctly noted that in a Web 2.0 world, the power to create and manage content is transferred from traditional information gatekeepers to the users of that information. For IT departments, this means giving up a large measure of control, allowing employees to shape and develop their online experiences organically. 

This means things could get messy. Very messy. Orderly taxonomy trees are nowhere to be found. Information is edited and tagged and linked and organized in numerous ways by numerous users at numerous times. 

IT departments need to give employees the tools to collaborate — blogs, wikis, etc. — and then, as McAfee said, “get out of the way.” There is no way to accurately predict how people are going to use Web 2.0 technologies, so there is no point in imposing an IT structure upon them. 

And I think this is a scary proposition to most IT professionals. Maybe I’m wrong, and I hardly think that Web 2.0 is going to make IT departments obsolete, but I wonder if some CIOs might be asking themselves, “If users can easily develop and manage their own online tools and communities, what’s left for us to do?”

Nortel and IBM announced this week that they’re launching a VoIP system specifically for SMBs. ITNews.com has a good preview here, as does Search400.com. TelecomWeb notices the joint announcement sounds awfully familiar to a partnership Nortel formed with Microsoft last year and wonders what Cisco’s response might be.

Google continues to make headlines this week, but not for reasons it would like.  The AP reported Saturday: 

“Google Inc.’s privacy practices are the worst among the Internet’s top destinations, according to a watchdog group seeking to intensify the recent focus on how the online search leader handles personal information about its users.” 

But it didn’t take long for Google to respond. From today’s New York Times : 

“Faced with criticism from privacy activists and questions from the European Union, Google announced on Tuesday that it would cut back on how long it keeps the Web search histories of users, to 18 months from 24.” 

Writing on its own corporate blog, Google lawyers Peter Fleischer and Nicole Wong tried to put a positive spin on the situation: 

“After talking with leading privacy stakeholders in Europe and the U.S., we’re pleased to be taking this important step toward protecting your privacy. By anonymizing our server logs after 18-24 months, we think we’re striking the right balance between two goals: continuing to improve Google’s services for you, while providing more transparency and certainty about our retention practices.” 

My first response: Is “anonymizing” even a word?  

Second response: Somehow, I doubt this latest move by Google will be enough to get privacy advocates off its back. There’s surely more backlash to come over Google Street View, as this post from Threat Level will attest. Looks like Fleischer and Wong have their work cut out for them.

When he started his first job, Dennis Moore was, as he put it, a task worker. Aside from a 10- or 15-minute briefing at the start of his shift on the Proctor & Gamble factory floor making soap, Moore had access to little, if any, information once he was on the clock.

But times have changed. Speaking today at the IDC IT Forum & Expo in Boston, Moore, now general manager of emerging solutions at SAP, spoke of the rise of the information worker, one who not only expects but also needs constant access to company information to successfully do his or her job. 

Even in manufacturing environments, information workers are quickly replacing task workers. Moore said he recently visited a GE plant where employees sport wrist-mounted computers to keep up to speed on company developments. 

So how do you foster a work environment that stresses access to real-time information, knowledge sharing and employee collaboration? You guessed it: Web 2.0.

Blogs, RSS and wikis are the equivalent today of the PC and voicemail 20 years ago, Moore said, and are the tools that will enable information workers to do their jobs more efficiently than ever before.

Surprising then, or is it, that of the 50 to 60 attendees listening to Moore’s presentation, exactly zero raised a hand when Moore asked how many currently worked at a company that uses any Web 2.0 technologies. 

Even more flabbergasting, only half said they even had a reasonable grasp of what Web 2.0 means! And this is a room full of IT pros! Moore even had to explain what RSS was, and by the looks on some of the faces in the crowd, it was clear that it was news to them.

During the same presentation, though, Moore cited an IDC survey that found that 45% of companies are at least experimenting with blogs, 43% with RSS and 35% with wikis.

How can this be? How can the percentage of Web 2.0 users in a room full of IT pros be 0%, and the percentage of companies as a whole using Web 2.0 technologies hover somewhere near the 40% mark?

The answer: More and more employees are bringing Web 2.0 technologies into the enterprise without the involvement of IT. Even within IT departments, Moore said, rouge workers are experimenting with blogs and wikis for work purposes without IT managers even being aware of it. 

The problem, of course, is that when employees introduce unauthorized technologies to the workplace, the risk of a security breach or accidental noncompliance goes up enormously. And who’s ultimately held responsible? The IT department, in general; CIOs and IT managers, specifically.

Blogs and wikis aren’t going away, on that everyone can agree. And while I’ve written before and still believe that it’ll be some time before Web 2.0 technologies penetrate the enterprise mainstream, it seems clear to me that it’s high time IT pros wake up to the coming Web 2.0 wave before it topples them and their careers.