Because of the recent departure of Apple’s Senior VP of Enterprise Sales, John C. Welch claims that “the Mac IT crowd” is wondering if Apple is abandoning the Enterprise. He then goes on to say that this depends on whether or not you thought “Apple was, or wanted to be, an ‘enterprise’ company.”
Um… No it doesn’t…
Mr. Welch raises some good points in his article, the main premise of which is that Apple is, indeed, not an enterprise company, an idea I fully agree with. But the fact is that it’s certainly possible to worry that Apple will abandon the enterprise without thinking of them as an enterprise company. And that’s because Apple makes enterprise products that some of us have come to rely on.
Mac Server: I'll Miss You When You're Gone
I don’t think many IT folk — Mac or otherwise — think of Apple as an enterprise company. In fact, I’d venture to say that we worry that Apple will abandon us because we know know full well that Apple is not such a company at heart, and that their connections to enterprise are tenuous at best. But some of us do actually appreciate the design and ease-of-use of their server products. In my case, I’ve come to rely fairly heavily on Mac OS X Server for cross-platform authentication, among other things. I get flack for this sometimes, but the plain fact is that no one has integrated authentication for Mac, Windows and Linux in one spot in such an easy-to-build package as Mac OS X Server. Could I do this with a Windows server? Sure. Could I do it on Linux? Yes, of course I could. But I’ll spend twice as long building it, and twice as much time maintaining it, when Mac OS X Server does it out of the box with ease and grace. I suppose I could punch myself in the face over and over again as well. Do I want to? Not particularly.
I often worry that Apple will someday leave the server market altogether. I sometimes even worry that Apple will stop building high-end workstations. Hell, who knows? Maybe Apple will stop selling computers one day. But I don’t worry about these things because I think Apple is one kind of company or another. I worry about them because these are products that I enjoy using on a daily basis, and I would like to keep using them for as long as they’re the best tool for the job.
2 Comments
I don’t see Apple killing the XServe or OS X Server. After all, APple is not going to run their own network on Linux or Windows servers, so a lot of the cost of development and maintenance of Server is something they have to pay for anyway, and maintaining it at product quality benefits their own internal network.
And, they need to run it on something. They need to either rack Powermacs, or rack 1U servers of some kind, and as long as the economics make 1U servers attractive they’re going to want to benefit from that too.
I’m sure you’re right, and I don’t really sit around and worry all that much about it.
But Apple does have a history of abandonware. And, I believe, there was a time in the past when Apple did not use their own hardware and software for their own network servers. So there is an argument to be made that if server-side stuff — or anything else for that matter — stopped being profitable, Apple might stop selling it.
Actually, I think it’s more likely Apple makes server software and gear to make inroads for their workstations in corporate environments, and I suspect that that’s been a useful strategy for them. I hope it continues to be.
-systemsboy