WTF?! I was just now reading about this...how dumb. I realize the OS X server market is very small, but hell, so is Apple's overall global market share...what next...discontinuing Macs because "hardly anyone buys them"? Yes I know OS X Server can be run on the Mac Pro (if you want Xserve specs) but that thing isn't rack-mountable.
Not that I was ever going to be able to afford an Xserve myself...but still. Dumbest f--- up from Apple in a while.
Ummm... At the most, Apple probably sold around 10,000 Xserves a quarter. That wouldn't amount to 0.5% market share of which is a much smaller and very specialized market than the PC market. Well over 1,300,000 Windows servers are sold per quarter but that's still peanuts compared to around 75,000,000 PC's sold per quarter around the world.
In contrast, Apple sells over 42,000 Macs
per day and growing at 25%+ year-over-year. On a
daily basis, Apple also sells well over 150,000 iPhones and 50,000 iPads and these numbers will probably double over the next year. Over 1,300,000,000 phones are sold per year, so Apple still has long, long ways to go and plenty of room to grow with a very profitable product. Which businesses would you focus on?
Apple sold more Macs last quarter than they did all year several years ago. Apple is selling more Macs than ever before and the Mac business alone account for $22 billion in annual sales. Tim Cook pointed out that number would be #65 on the Fortune 500 chart. The Mac business is very profitable for Apple as well. Although Apple's market share in global PC unit shipments is only around 5%, it is estimated that Apple rakes in 35% of the profits.
It'd be great if Apple can also make high-end profitable servers, but those (like IBM's fully-loaded mainframes and Power UNIX servers) would cost well over $1 million each. In the low-end, cheap generic servers running Wintel and Linux cost less than half the amount of the Xserve with inferior specs and performance.
Also, servers have a much longer upgrade/replacement cycle than PC's and certainly mobile devices like phones and tablets. Servers, if maintained properly, can easily do what they're supposed to do for a decade or longer, if necessary. So IT departments are much stingier about upgrading or replacing old servers. They can just upgrade or add additional processors or just add a few more servers to the existing infrastructure if they need to expand. Server companies make more money doing maintenance and doing consulting and integration work than selling the hardware.
I'd say Apple knows exactly what they're doing. They're focusing on what they do best in markets they know they can compete in. That means the consumer market. The enterprise
backend is not an area that Apple ever cared about and never had expertise in. Apple
is making a big push into the enterprise but it will for the front end client devices with the iPhone, iPad and the MacBooks. Apple will have a much easier time selling these devices to the large enterprises than selling servers.
