I was surprised they didn't have this 10-15 years ago. I sort of wonder if Jobs had lived if he'd had pivoted towards this enterprise/support direction.
On a related note, once I took the tests for the SP and SA certifications (in 2009), my name was supposed to show up on Apple's site for certified professionals. This was important, as any employer would check that list to make sure your certifications were up to date. Apparently that process wasn't automatic, as I wasn't on the list after three months. One email to steve@apple.com later and I was on the site!
With enterprise software, the end user is almost never the actual paying customer, which when you are trying to make really end-user focused products that delight in the way Apple do, can lead to incentives that prioritise enterprise needs over consumer - look at the huge number of enterprise specific features Microsoft historically have built, that have affected consumers too. Jobs loved making consumer products so much, I can't imagine he ever would have been able to really chase enterprise customers.
The move to targeting services and enterprise more at Apple happened under Cook, because, well, he has to continue growing the company and Services + more engagement with enterprise markets have been critical to growth post Jobs under Cook. Perhaps Steve ultimately would have done the same as Cook, given iPhone can't grow forever etc, but it would have been a major shift in his opinions/outlook for Apple.
I'm talking about "Enterprise" in the traditional software industry sense, which is not the same industry apple target for creative professionals, even if tools like MDM etc can overlap. Jobs loved "professional" users in creative industries, not enterprise volume sales and fleet management tools etc etc.
Which is a shame NeXT (apple) had a world leading ORM and RPC system in 1990. It would still impress people today.
I also suspect people raised alongside ubiquitous web 2.0 technology would be a lot less impressed with the NeXT demos than all of us who saw them with pre-web eyes.
It’s equivalent to rails or similar orms. But it integrated with interface builder. See this [1] demo about 23 minutes in… just after he demos how great next step handles faces. He demos building a query crud app fully drag n drop.
Are you sure DO was available in OS X?
There's a good quote in this 2010 article: https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-steve-jobs-hates-about-th...
>"What I love about the consumer market, that I always hated about the enterprise market, is that we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every person votes for themselves. They go 'yes' or 'no,' and if enough of them say 'yes,' we get to come to work tomorrow. That's how it works. It's really simple. With the enterprise market, it's not so simple. The people that use the products don't decide for themselves, and the people that make those decisions sometimes are confused. We love just trying to make the best products in the world for people and having them tell us by how they vote with their wallets whether we're on track or not."
This professional training would help with that. It's not necessarily that things aren't available. Sometimes it's just not having someone that knows how to.
Due to near-dominance of iPhone/iPads, Apple doesn't have a problem getting mindshare these days, so brand familiarity (which could be an offsetting benefit of a stronger enterprise presence) is not much of a problem.