There are two questions, actually: one, is Apple's rapid expansion into the phone business and reconsideration as a business platform causing quality problems in its product lines? And two, will those problems (regardless of the cause) torpedo its chances to expand significantly into the enterprise market?

The many issues with the recently released 3G iPhone are well-documented elsewhere, but there have been some recent suggestions that other product lines are suffering as well... most significantly, the power/business user oriented Macbook Pro laptop lines.

It's no stretch to imagine that ramping up production may have lead to quality control issues on the assembly lines. But although Apple is making gains in the market, they haven't been so rapid or dramatic that such problems are inevitable. The question may be, then, is it the combination of expansion in multiple product lines that is causing issues? I've previously discussed reasons why I think that Apple is not well-oriented or organized to take on more traditional enterprise hardware and software providers. This may, however, be another signal that the company is not poised to make great strides in the enterprise.

Apple is no Microsoft, which is fortunate on many levels, but Microsoft is a massive entity with sufficient segmentation to operate on many levels simultaneously and provide the requisite level of service to important customers (of which there are relatively few for most parts of the company). Apple, on the other hand, has traditionally been pretty much a one-trick pony, notwithstanding the recent successes in phones and audio players. It's possible they don't have the capabilities built up internally to address these problems selectively and appropriately. On top of that, their marketing strategy means that all their users are important; to get into the enterprise, Apple is relying on a ground-up movement from interested individual users, rather than a concerted effort aimed directly at enterprise IT departments. This requires their support resources to be spread much more thinly than providers who are focused on dealing with a single point of contact at IT departments representing thousands of users.

Those resources have never been quite equal to the task of matching the responsiveness and support that enterprise IT departments can get from other vendors, but at this point it looks as though they are getting worse, not better.