https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-apple-had-to-kill-the-xser...
Apple toyed with becoming more enterprisey at various times but their ultimate success came mostly from BYOD and enterprises proving Mac options because that's what many of their employees wanted. They do have business sales but it's still more of a pull than a push thing.
Now, Xserve didn’t work for a lot of reasons, but Apple exited the server market, and even stopped making the Server variant of macOS (even though it was just a handful of utilities at the end), largely because I think it realized two things:
1. It could never truly compete with Linux (and to a lesser degree, IIS) without making significant tradeoffs that are anathema to Apple (lowering prices significantly, giving up usage control, and decoupling vertically integrated hardware/software).
2. The cost of truly making a B2B play would require resource investments and commitments into an area Apple doesn’t need to care about and that would come at the expense of areas that are both more profitable and less of a PITA.
Apple is the richest company in the world and amongst the most profitable tech companies, why would they bother with enterprise when they can allow partners to deal with the integration side and focus on doing their stuff their way.
(There is one notable instance where Apple embraced enterprise, and that was when Apple added Exchange support in iPhone OS and admittedly, this was a huge deal and was ultimately a fatal blow to Blackberry. But it’s the exception that almost proves the rule. Apple added support for Exchange but left it up to others to figure out the broader MDM situations.)
Having said all that, I have always been surprised Apple hasn’t offered some sort of build/test service themselves and integrated it into TestFlight. It could be a driver for the all-important services revenue (in my imagination, the annual developer fee would cover a certain number of build minutes a month and then additional minutes would cost money). I have to think that such a solution is either in the works or that Apple looked at the support challenges and just decided to let other people do it at scale for them.
The thing is that much of the cloud is very much a commodity and Apple has successfully made its products and services anything but a commodity.
Yep. There have been a couple of specific things. Exchange and now MDM profiles. Probably a few others. But minor tweaks to remove major enterprise blockers. Small investments to remove complete showstoppers is just common sense.
>Apple hasn’t offered some sort of build/test service themselves and integrated it into TestFlight
Seems pretty logical. Who knows? It's certainly the trend with container platforms generally.
AWS was nothing if not a "B2B play" from the beginning. Having developed their own expertise with data centers and distributed computing, Amazon proceeded to sell that to other businesses.
In fact, as far as AWS is concerned, Amazon is just another big customer — and not even the biggest.
I may not be the typical end user, but I’m also not a business.
I predict they will build customer-facing 'cloud-powered features' where 'third party app code' can run on the apple cloud infrastructure 'on behalf' of a particular apple customer.
They will present a utility computing model to customers -- where each customer sees 'cloud-computing usage charges' displayed by app.
Ultimately, the cloud-compute/cloud-storage charges will tie back to the customer associated usage costs for storage or some other abstract usage based model of for cloud resource costs.
"Apple Cloud: build features for apple customers using usage-metered cloud resources -- with the customer paying for the usage charges they incur."
Unfortunately, Apple makes it somewhat uneconomical to use Macs in small bursts, as their license requires that Macs are leased for at least 24 hours.
The reason Apple doesn't do well B2B is nothing about their technology or marketing, it is likely all about their business operations. Apple is notorious for driving their own product-development lifecycle with heavy priority on their own design language. This is completely the opposite of how B2B sales work, where it is not uncommon for some development cycles to be dictated directly by a few (or even one) customer. I can't see Apple playing well with these expectations.
Development and sales (and support). Look at how many SKUs competing laptop manufacturers have because enterprises will specify some combination of ports and memory and CPU, and if the manufacturer doesn't have that particular combination, there will be no sale.
(Having said that: it's not obvious to me whether this is still as much of an issue as it used to be.)