Steve Jobs: Xserve Axed Over Poor Sales

[coleridge78]

But I can tell you one thing for sure - and no offense - but anyone who questions the need for redundant power supplies and suggests using machines with a form factor like the Mac Pros in server room looks more in the "Doesn't know anything" category than some who throws around "ERP".

Have you heard of ILO and ILOMs - does Mac Pro have something similar? Or do you think it's useless as you have never used it and every server should have a display attached and admins should locally administer it? May be serial consoles and KVM are useless too as you have never captures and OOPS either?

No offense taken. I didn't suggest that anyone fill a server room with Mac Pros. I think it'd be stupid on purely obvious physical grounds: they aren't designed to make the most efficient use of available floor space in a mass collection. They don't have the airflow characteristics, they aren't particularly dense in terms of processing-power-to-space (in no small part because they aren't designed for headless use as a primary use case), etc. Hot-swappable drives in a server were really important, now less so in *many* (not all) environments, as critical storage is more and more offloaded and separated from the clustered, interchangeable, silent-failover processing.

As far as ILOM, yes, I'm intimately familiar. Writing SAN striping scripts for solaris 9 jumpstarting is what finally made me decide that I liked C and assembly better than sysadmin duties. Serial console, check--only twice did I meet a 3am page that needed a physical visit, and both times turned out to be vendor "solution" failures.

Point is, none of this is news to me. I wasn't saying it's all irrelevant, I was saying that anyone who thinks they need the "fully-redundant" infrastructure as specifically described above for their CRM is either selling, or has been sold, a bill of goods.

 

[HLdan]

His responses are pithy and cocky. And they're far too infrequent for any admiration as a customer-friendly CEO. I've emailed the man at least 6 times, and have never received a response.

I'm not knocking the decision to cancel the Xserv. I'm just saying there is some justification for poor sales when the updates are so sorely needed, and the price is so high. Couple that with a lack of marketing and the blame cannot be placed solely on the market. Apple has decided not to go after the pro market. It's not strictly a customer decision, which is how Jobs's douchey response makes it sound.

Your post is exactly why Jobs should never respond to customer emails. He shouldn't do it anyway. I'm willing to bet he's the only CEO that does.

 

[MacMan67]

Time for someone to make a Mac Pro rack mount kit... seems like it wouldn't be too hard.

I know it will be a few RU - but better than standing it on a tray.

They are already out there, for both vertical and horizontal installations..

 

[hayesk]

Let's hope those buying those 10,000 or so Xserves per quarter weren't also using these to manage large deployments of Mac clients. This could have a bigger impact than just those 10,000 units per quarter.

A very bad way to do business in the entreprise.

I think Apple is more aware of how their XServes are being deployed than you or I. You also don't need XServes to serve large deployments of Macs.

 

[nagromme]

You’d think they’d take the loss on R&D just to keep a toehold that might one day be important. (Not to mention bragging rights from some big installations—including their own.)

Maybe the next pro tower will at least have (optional) swappable drive bays and power supplies. Make it side-mountable and although it’s not 1U (not suitable for big farms), it would at least meet some of that OS X enterprise market without maintaining a whole separate machine in the lineup.

 

[Mattie Num Nums]

To the people saying buy more mac mini's you gave no clue what you are talking about.

I could buy 1 XServe, 10 copies of VMWare, 10 copies of OSX Server, and run 10 servers on one piece of hardware without voiding my EULA.

Along with redundant backup, hot swappable drives, fiber, LOM, and constant backup snap shots.

 

[realitymonkey]

What would be more interesting to know is what the cost for Apple is to keep the Xserve development team going ? This I would assume high cost per unit sold (relative say to the iPhone) also what has to be added to the support requirements from a very technical and demanding user base so would require relatively specialist support staff who can advise people in a niche sector when compared to the average say Macbook consumer who can't make iPhoto work and can be supported in your local Apple store when they bring it in.

Apple have of course done some work on the numbers and come to a conclusion the benefits outweigh the downside and over the last little while I would back this work as they seem to have gotten it about right. (Remember the no Firewire/no matte screen fights of the last few years....)

 

[afrowq]

Your post is exactly why Jobs should never respond to customer emails. He shouldn't do it anyway. I'm willing to bet he's the only CEO that does.

I'm not following you here. Are you saying he shouldn't respond? I thought you said it was worthy of admiration that he responds?

He is definitely NOT the only CEO that responds to emails.

 

[coleridge78]

This case is different, they are bowing out of the server hardware market. Enabling "clones" for OS X Server thus does not compete against their own hardware offering, since they have none now.

So yes, totally different.

Still have to disagree, for reasons already explained. I did say that it's different in that it wouldn't kill their core business, but it's the same in that it would kill one segment of their business in precisely the same manner--so why bother?

Specifically, they'd be competing against themselves in a certain range of businesses who could go either way between a virtualization solution or just throwing a couple of low-end Mac Pros in a corner, while likely not gaining themselves anything of value. And putting in effort that distracts them from places where they are making money. Apple 2.1 isn't big into distractions.

You will probably try to tell me that I don't know how the enterprise works, because people don't just throw a couple of machines in the corner as a one-off... and if you do, it'll show that your experience isn't very wide-ranging. Because one-off junk like that is all-too-common in most places.

 

[Chupa Chupa]

Well no duh. Why did everyone think Apple dropped them?

Well a lot of people here think Apple dropped them b/c Steve Jobs is either a big old meanie out to sabotage his own company and stick a fork in the eye of the hardest of hard core Apple geeks and nerds, or that he is a dunce and doesn't know what the hell he is doing.

Yes, hard to believe people think axing a product is related to nothing more than sales or the direction a company is going but you saw the Xserve is killed thread.

 

[BrotherBeagle]

You’d think they’d take the loss on R&D just to keep a toehold that might one day be important. (Not to mention bragging rights from some big installations—including their own.)

Maybe the next pro tower will at least have (optional) swappable drive bays and power supplies. Make it side-mountable and although it’s not 1U (not suitable for big farms), it would at least meet some of that OS X enterprise market without maintaining a whole separate machine in the lineup.

Or give many anti-Apple admin level individuals the ammunition they've been looking for to remove the Macs from the network. As a Mac admin myself, if Apple cannot provide a realistic solution, I'm forced to wonder how to justify refreshing vs. replacing.

 

[pgwalsh]

Doesn't make sense unless there's a new avenue.

It doesn't make sense since Apple is gaining market share. It seems it's more viable now than ever. However, that being said, I am thinking Apple might come out with something else or perhaps finally release OS X Server to run on hardware other than Apple.

I remember the days when everyone laughed at the possibility of Apple going x86. The same naysayers will probably refute this as well, but I think there's a very good possibility.

 

[Mattie Num Nums]

Well a lot of people here think Apple dropped them b/c Steve Jobs is either a big old meanie out to sabotage his own company and stick a fork in the eye of the hardest of hard core Apple geeks and nerds, or that he is a dunce and doesn't know what the hell he is doing.

Yes, hard to believe people think axing a product is related to nothing more than sales or the direction a company is going but you saw the Xserve is killed thread.

No, its axing an Enterprise solution without giving clients any warning or any roadmap.

 

[Boston007]

Let's hope those buying those 10,000 or so Xserves per quarter weren't also using these to manage large deployments of Mac clients. This could have a bigger impact than just those 10,000 units per quarter.

A very bad way to do business in the entreprise.

Apple has always been this way. Why should it surprise people?

Fanboys will surely give Jobs the benefit of the doubt though, right? Of course.

HYPOCRISY at its finest.

 

[jwsmiths]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

I doubt it was a hot seller 579 days ago after the last update either. If it were it probably would have gotten more updates.

 

[crackpip]

I could buy 1 XServer, 10 copies of VMWare, 10 copies of OSX Server, and run 10 servers on one piece of hardware without voiding my EULA.

Along with redundant backup, hot swappable drives, fiber, LOM, and constant backup snap shots.

Do you do this with XServes? Do you know of anyone who uses XServes to maintain a large base of Mac clients? If so what services to they use? I'm not interested in can, I'm interested in those who do.

crackpip

 

[morespce54]

Wow, nine syllables. That was pretty long for Steve Jobs.

So true!
He would usually just say something like "No" or, worst case scenario "Don't sell"... Mmmm... It smells fishy. 10/1 he isn't the real Steve!

 

[Mattie Num Nums]

Do you do this with XServes? Do you know of anyone who uses XServes to maintain a large base of Mac clients? If so what services to they use? I'm not interested in can, I'm interested in those who do.

crackpip

I have one Xserve running the following:

1 OSX Server - JSS
1 OSX Server - AFP Distribution Point
1 OSX Server - SMB Distribution Point
1 OSX Server - SUS
1 OSX Server - Netboot

Why did we choose this route? Zero Downtime and the ability to scale based on traffic.

My last company had 2500 Xserves. The guys I talked to that still work at that location have told me that they just spent 10 million dollars in upgrades 2 months ago.

 

[HLdan]

I'm not following you here. Are you saying he shouldn't respond? I thought you said it was worthy of admiration that he responds?

He is definitely NOT the only CEO that responds to emails.

I'm saying that he should not respond to customer emails. CEO's have "Yes Men" to do those things. Yeah, I'm sure other CEO's respond to customer emails but I'm referring to large corporations, not mom and pop entities.

I get frustrated at this forum on how some people here get annoyed at Job's responses. Do you have any idea how many emails he probably gets from customers? I certainly don't, however I'm sure it's a plenty. I'm sure he has other things to do than sit back and respond to the most likely hundreds of emails he gets a week from customers that are most likely nonsense and rants. Do people actually expect him to write beautiful long winded personal emails with love attached to them?

Where did I say it was "worthy of admiration" that he responds?

 

[Merthyrboy]

Makes one wonder what servers are in Apple's new data center.

They could stick anything they want in by even making themselves a Xserve pro if they wanted to it wouldn't be limited by what consumors want but what they want more than usual

 

[KnightWRX]

Point is, none of this is news to me. I wasn't saying it's all irrelevant, I was saying that anyone who thinks they need the "fully-redundant" infrastructure as specifically described above for their CRM is either selling, or has been sold, a bill of goods.

And you know the scope of my CRM from ... what exactly ? Let me tell you, there are laws in place that dictate the uptime my CRM needs to have unfortunately, it has to do with the very specific field my company operates in.

Anything less than fully redundant would be suicide for us.

 

[iSee]

Let's hope those buying those 10,000 or so Xserves per quarter weren't also using these to manage large deployments of Mac clients. This could have a bigger impact than just those 10,000 units per quarter.

A very bad way to do business in the entreprise.

It sounds to me like a good way to do business.

I can't understand all the complaining about this. If xserves are selling poorly, Apple has to change course. E.g., (1) kill the product; (2) drop prices; (3) invest $ in a new direction -- if you can find one that is competitive. I guess they couldn't do (2) or figure out a good way forward with (3), so they went with (1) -- that's what any business would/should do with a tiny, non-core part of their business that isn't performing well.

 

[Tomple]

It sounds to me like a good way to do business.

I can't understand all the complaining about this. If xserves are selling poorly, Apple has to change course. E.g., (1) kill the product; (2) drop prices; (3) invest $ in a new direction -- if you can find one that is competitive. I guess they couldn't do (2) or figure out a good way forward with (3), so they went with (1) -- that's what any business would/should do with a tiny, non-core part of their business that isn't performing well.

Makes sense, thanks for this post!

 

[parapup]

Point is, none of this is news to me. I wasn't saying it's all irrelevant, I was saying that anyone who thinks they need the "fully-redundant" infrastructure as specifically described above for their CRM is either selling, or has been sold, a bill of goods.

I oversee around 200+ servers that have numerous times had failed power supplies - multiple vendors, multinational data centers - Sun, IBM, HP, data centers in NA, EU, AP - if it wasn't for redundancy that would have meant huge losses. (For instance if a server with a single power supply was to fail in the middle of a distributed DB transaction leaving locks on the DB - end of story, hundreds of thousands lost.)

The point is there cannot be 100% complete redundancy just like there cannot be 100% security - you just put barriers to security as much as practically feasible and hope that it saves you. So yeah motherboards can fail but they only fail due to overheating. Not so much with moving parts - PS Fans, Disks etc or with memory - that's why ECC. So you pick up the most likely failure candidates (software included) and design redundancy around them.

You then have replacement policies to guard from unforeseen failures due to overuse - motherboard for instance.

 

[Skika]

Please, instead of attacking me, how about you then proceed to attack my arguments if they are so bad ?

Until then, I stick by what I said. I work in this field and having been on call many Christmases, I wouldn't give up my redundant hardware that is easily serviceable while online for all the promises in the world.

Ad hominem is ad hominem. Evangelion doesn't know what he's talking about. You're free to show me the errors of my ways if you actually do.

You cannot show another the error of his ways if that another is 100% convinced he is right.

There is not an argument great enough to do it, because the more you try to convince another he is wrong the more he defends.

Arguing is stupid and pointless. Just accept that people have different truths and that there is not one truth. Stick to yours and let other people stick to theirs.