To be fair to everyone else, the fact that Apple has no penetration into the enterprise space is entirely Apple's choosing.
My company (a Fortune 100) and I know a LOT of others, WANT to embrace Apple and Mac OS X, but I was flat-out told by our Apple rep that Apple has zero interest in the enterprise.
So I'm not entirely sure RIP is even in order. Sounds like patricide to me.
Apple has much more than zero interest in the Enterprise, with over half of the Fortune 1000 actively investigating the deployment of Apple's mobile offerings. And Apple's signaled that they're actually starting to make their move.
Curious but not coincidental: Apple's reported to be signing a service agreement with Unisys that will bring reps into the Enterprise on a nationwide scale. And I thought first, yaay, this is the real beginning of Apple Enterprise at last.
I certainly noticed the agreement covered iOS products, so I read again and noticed what it didn't discuss covering was Macs. Wasn't sure I didn't think about X-Serve at the time.
Connect those dots - cancel X-Serve, start an Enterprise operation thru Univsys and don't include Macs in the deal - and Apple's vision of its future role in the business computing market is clear in three letters:
iOS .............................................................................................................
And it makes sense when thought about. Apple's long-awaited (by many us) push is into the frontier where there's no one to displace except smallish RIM who are currently struggling to turn a messaging phone into a smart one - and where growth is going to be explosive - and where MS, tho' they've had primitive devices there for years, are now behind. The alternative was directly taking on a entrenched, mature, slower-growing PC and small server market long owned and extensively serviced by MS.
Had Win 7 been Vista 2 (i.e., a technical and design failure), there might've been a slightly different script with Macs also playing a role.
But iOS would still be the wedge of the assault... ...what's harder to discern is whether this was all a real plan in their visionary's eyes back in '06 when the iPhone was being readied for the world, or more a serendipitous consequence of its astounding success, followed by the iPad's breaking open a whole new area of computing.
PS: There is one more dot. Workers are increasingly pushing their employers to let them use their own devices of choice while at work, and IT is learning it's easier to support those devices than to force staff to adapt to the corporate's standard, plus it cuts training costs dramatically and increases employee satisfaction. So Apple's focus on the consumer market actually becomes their entree into the corp world. Slick, that!
