On the Mac side of things, they're cutting back on enterprise sales (witness the death of the Xserve) and pushing most of the contact information for smaller customers to the retail business people.
On the Mac side of things, they're cutting back on enterprise sales (witness the death of the Xserve) and pushing most of the contact information for smaller customers to the retail business people.
They just engaged Unisys to support and infiltrate the enterprise (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-25/apple-enlists-unisy...)
I'm not saying your interpretation of the Xserve discontinuation is wrong, just that i hadn't seen anybody with that interpretation before, and i'd love to hear more.
In the past, there was a lot of poaching of deals between departments within Apple - retail would make a deal for >30 machines with an organization, only to have Enterprise call the customer up (they share CRM) and offer the exact same deal with a price below what Retail was allowed to discount.
It's an internal org chart change, as far as I can tell. Why have dedicated enterprise reps in a phone center somewhere that can't have a face-to-face interaction with the customer, when in a lot of areas there's a retail store that can provide that, and get halo sales to employees, etc.