> I was an Apple SE a couple of times in my life and Chris is right. I was in > a meeting with Steve Jobs standing in front of the entire Enterprise Business > Sales team a few years ago when he was asked if Apple was seriously > interested in being an Enterprise Products company. His answer was typically > short and to the point. "Apple is not an Enterprise products company. We > are a Consumer products company. We may make products that Enterprise likes > but we are not an Enterprise company." A stunned silence for a minute from > the Enterprise Business team. > > I love my Macs but for serving in the future I'm moving to linux.
After what happened to EOF, and Web Objects, I completely stopped recommending any Apple systems for business applications or usage. I know that the WO folks insisted that WO was not abandoned, that all the tools that apple discarded were already obsolete and replaced with stuff that the community had developed, but the whole "EOF is now dependent on WO, and WO is now Java only, and EOF is now a second class java citizen -- if you can get it to work at all", followed by "We no longer support java, the bridge is gone, no one will be allowed to maintain it on their own", well, ..., 10.7 and apparently Java isn't even installed now? DBKit went bye-bye Toll free bridging went Bye-bye "Java is a full class language" went bye-bye Any sort of database support went bye-bye Any sort of persistent storage support went bye-bye (Add Rosetta, netinfo management of admin, netinfo as a corporate database, and your favorite apple technology here) I'm looking at things from this viewpoint now: Any Apple software technology will have an expected lifetime of about 5-10 years (max) and 1-2 forced hardware upgrades. I'd consider that unacceptable for any business with needs beyond QuickBooks. (And QB stinks as a business tool. It stinks less now (well, 2010 edition) than it used to.) >>> This has nothing to do with enterprise vs consumer. Apple has a built-in >>> aversion to running their OS on non-apple gear stemming from how horribly >>> they were hurt by clones. >> >> That's ridiculous. Clones were siphoning hardware sales. That is not what a >> license to virtualize would do because Apple isn't selling such hardware >> anymore. It would simply let people who have made a major investment in Mac >> OS X Server solutions migrate to new hardware, while consolidating systems. If you let people run current apple software on non-mac hardware, you lose the hardware sales. If you _SELL_ licenses to let people run older apple software on non-mac hardware, you have to provide maintenance for that software, with a lot of driver/hardware headaches. If you don't sell, but just permit people to run old software, then they don't have to spend to upgrade. Where I think Apple is _FAIL_ is simple: Why can't I run older software in a VM on current Apple hardware? They got my money -- again --, and I'm not expecting support. Just no more "We're the VM software, we won't let you boot that drive unless you go through mount/script/unmount pain". Why expect/permit/require third parties to enforce your license? Where I think Apple is big-time fail, is this: Why is the software underpriced, and the hardware overpriced? Why the lock-in factor? Is it to compete with MicroSoft's lock-in factor? (And why does it seem like every other software upgrade requires a hardware upgrade?) Where I think the government is a fail: Why is any corporation lock-in allowed, given that it restricts consumers, and at face seems to violate various anti-trust/anti-monopoly/free competition laws on the books? My reason for using Apple's OS at this point is simple: It stinks less than Microsoft's OS, and (gui-wise) is more usable than Linux. Microsoft's is a lost hope, and if Linux die-hards start treating the gui seriously, that will win. -- Political and economic blog of a strict constitutionalist http://StrictConstitution.BlogSpot.com This message may have been spell checked by a laptop kitten. _______________________________________________ MacOSX-admin mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-admin
