Apple Acquires Fleetsmith
blog.fleetsmith.com
blog.fleetsmith.com
I can understand having to sunset the catalog, but how did Fleetsmith (or Apple) think that doing that without one peep was okay? Even a "we've been informed by legal that we can't host these packages, so within x days they will be removed from our catalog. we will provide functionality to replace them on your systems with packages you make yourself".
0: https://www.reddit.com/r/macsysadmin/comments/hf30qk/apple_b... (discussion about fallout)
Transition during an acquisition is driven by the M&A and legal teams which are more focused on mitigating deal risk than providing customer/product benefit. It's just simply not top of mind for them. It then takes a while for the acquired team and tech to work their way into the engineering organization but by that time the damage of the initial decisions is done.
But just as likely the business team either is inexperienced or doesn't have clear objectives for the transition and therefore doesn't give the deal/legal team the feedback they need to strike the right balance. A good lawyer will fish for these types of issues, but its hard to know what you don't know, especially if you're not in direct contact with the right people.
I can't imagine that IBM would make an acquisition like this and screw it up in quite this way.
Oh really ? IBM's probably the most enterprisey lawyer-driven tech outfit there is ?
And even if they didn't, its IBM ... they've got a dozen other ways they'll mess it up.
IBM is a brand relic living in the glories of its past. Its not the company it used to be.
Let me introduce you to Rambus. Once a strong chip manufacturer and system bus innovator with products used in the Nintendo 64 and Playstation 3, it now employs an equal number of lawyers and engineers. Most of the companies revenues have shifted from technology licencing to technology litigation.
They really should have put together a migration plan that included time for an orderly transition and a way to automatically move the third-party apps into the custom catalog, maybe even after the administrator accepts liability for distributing those apps.
That's a lot of pain for admins, especially in a SME environment where I'm not aware of any viable alternatives …
So, they're already learning from Apple?
I don't need 2 different cloud storage providers, let me use the one I already have.
Android doesn't have most of these restrictions so OneDrive works more like iCloud there.
Despite that, I'm not paying an extra $10/mo on top of the $99/yr I pay for Office 365 because the limitations are artificial. I can launch OneDrive to sync photos/videos just fine, all my contacts are already in the cloud and I can make manual backups of my phone directly to my PC but frankly all the content I care about is not on the phone so I only do that before any major upgrades.
If preloading Chrome on Android is anti-competitive, the way Apple uses its market power to give preferential treatment to its own services vs spotify, onedrive, etc is definitely anticompetetive.
I tried to give OneDrive a chance but the close integration with Microsoft Office meant that I frequently could not save the documents I was working on because OneDrive didn't want to save. The nagging to install OneDrive killed it for me because it caused lost work.
Microsoft did the same with OneNote. OneNote was a great notetaking application, but Microsoft managed to put two buttons on the taskbar, three on the desktop, commandeer the Print Dialogs and use every other trick in the book to trick people into using it. Then it a fit of mindlessness they removed the ability to have a local (non-cloud) Notebook and I was gone.
I'm sure there's a perfect way to use it for all my use cases. But doing so would require I learn / study the correct OneDrive-specific settings. Which would only be useful for OneDrive.
But by far worse, the defaults on most Microsoft products don't follow first, do no harm. Consequently, unless I learn the settings and monkey with them, adopting the product will negatively impact me.
- No Windows support
- No Android support
- Synchronization is not reliable
- Very pricey, and free tier is too small
- "We're going to take all your documents hostage in our cloud, because you've got only 100GB space left" (after taking the space by APFS snapshots).
It might be fine for some casual users, but not for any device than stores anything serious.
I run my own services for email, web publishing, calendar, identity, remote storage, etc. So Icloud already would have to be better-enough than mine to make me want to change. When they do accomplish that, it is mainly by making it difficult or impossible to use mine.
I have a lot of history built up in my services that I'd have to agree to trash or somehow move. That history is important to me - I have a quarter-century of personal mail, and about 15 years of photography, as just a couple examples. Considering the average lifespan of Apple's various attempts at services over the years, this one is super easy - my "cloud" has already outlived nearly all of their offerings. Apple was hawking eWorld when I started running my mail server.
More generally, I trust myself more than I trust Apple to get this right. I understand why you trust Apple more than me, but that's an entirely different proposition. This isn't hubris, it's categorization - we operate at wildly different scales for wildly different-sized customer bases pursuing very different goals.
Finally, integration. Apple is going in the direction of integrated-everything. I'm pulling in the other direction - at this point most of my computing infra is not Apple, and I've already decided I'm not getting another Mac as my everyday laptop. I'll decide what that means about the phone next time I need to replace it, but it probably means we're headed for a divorce. Luckily, I've never put my data in a position to make that a harder choice than it should be.
So there you go.
No. They're already Apple.
Apple is likely wanting to bring macOS/iOS management into their own product suite and tightly integrate it in future products, much like what Microsoft did with Terminal Services, which nearly killed Citrix 20 years ago.
It's surprising because JamF is recommended as the de facto (only serious) solution for people serious managing fleets.
Shit, my org has over 15,000 group policy objects that have been collecting, getting linked across OUs, and duplicated for over 15 years. The whole thing is questionable.
It works though.
My perspective comes from talking to anyone on the Apple Business team at the San Francisco union square location, and also reps from apple's general business support line.
There are definitely a ton of other MDM solutions, but none that I've heard mentioned so frequently by apple employees as JamF.
A sampling of MDMs that large companies you've heard of use:
- vmware workspace one
- bare metal micromdm
- simplemdm
- fleetsmith
- kandji
- jamf
Zach Blum (CEO/co-founder) would regularly follow up on issues and tickets himself, always friendly and helpful.
I know transitions like this can be rough but I'm glad to see them achieve this success.
"We look forward to continuing to deliver Fleetsmith to existing and new customers." sure sounds like the service will stay open, AKA this is not Apple's usual acqui-hire and shut down the company.
* Until your hidden-from-view postgre SQL db gets corrupted and stops working and all the solutions on the Apple support forums are "couldn't find a fix so just flatten and reinstalled... now moving to Jamf", so every thing in PM is treated like a faberge egg and you're using a kludge of package managers and such to fill in the gaps.
Your 2012 Mac Mini Server in a Sonnet Rackmac needs it's dying 5400rpm HDD switched over to SSDs, which, now you're also using 3rd party hardware + SAS PCIe controllers to connect to a RAID / Tape Drive to keep this thing going.
* Every OS X update is held off because you're trigger shy of the last time it broke OS X Server and your 3rd party SAS controller drivers.
Yet another server to manage on site and/or spend too much $$$ on a boutique "Mac Stadium" data center which is essentially a colo'd Mac Mini.
Jamf Pro is more like Jank Pro but fuck me, it's a million times better than PM.
First time I met our now current Apple Systems Engineer for my region, he laughed when I said I had used PM in the past and said "Uhhh, yeah, don't use Profile Manager in production."
This announcement couldn't have come at a crazier time...today I planned on announcing our intentions to enter the MDM product space.
Our MDM is meant to be a new fresh take on device management that puts end-users in the driver seat. It's user focused device management and we are applying everything we've learned from our security product to the management space.
https://blog.kolide.com/kolide-mdm-for-those-that-dont-need-...
If you are interested in trying out what we are releasing later this year, read the post, and get on the list https://www.kolide.com/mdm/
Oh, so that means I can pay you a few hundred for a copy of your software and put it on my own ESXi system and have absolutely zero further dependency on you specifically or the internet in general beyond if I eventually decide to pay for further updates right? I'll have total control over all my data?
Oh, it's just another subscription service 3rd party dependency lock-in thing? Oh.
Besides that it's also a personal story "I've been working on a competitor for a while and this is weirdly nicely timed".
A few months ago burtonator was under almost every article advertising his project ("Javascript? During the development of Polar Bookshelf (getpolarized.io) I have used Javascript!"), which I personally found a lot more annoying.
In the sea of close to 100% of pointless ads you quickly forget that they are actually supposed to make you aware of something you want. For many people in this thread that has probably succeeded.
I work a lot in this space on https://micromdm.io/ an open source service, and have industry experience doing device management at various organizations.
What's the other commercial MDM product you endorsed? There seems to be quite a few dozens of commercial MDM providers out there.[1]
> They do great work and have the right vision.
Can you elaborate?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mobile_Device_Manageme...
Also as far as I know, SimpleMDM pricing[2] is not the cheapest in the market either, their feature set is similar to Mosyle's, but Mosyle's cheaper.[3]
[1:] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mobile_Device_Manageme...
SimpleMDM doesn't try to do everything, as the name implies, but instead they focus on doing what they do extremely well.
All third-party apps have now been pulled and we have virtually no fleet management.
Happy for them, but it's painful for us. Classic Apple move.
"Achieving compliance with the SOC 2 and ISO 27001 standards means that we are committed not just this year or the next — we are committed to operating our business in compliance with these standards every year going forward. Our auditors will request evidence to prove that we’ve continued to follow the policies, processes, and technical controls we’ve put in place on an annual basis. We look forward to demonstrating, year after year, that we’re worthy of your trust.
To get access to our SOC 2 report and ISO 27001 certificate, get in touch at sales@fleetsmith.com."
Apple has an ISO 27001 certification for Apple Business Manager, but I don't exactly see them being so hot on an independent CPA auditing their accounting practices for an AICPA certifications.
Personally, I think Fleetsmith being under Apple's control (a full service MDM solution provided solely by Apple), renders these certifications meaningless.
But hey, do you think if I email sales@fleetsmith.com, they'll be happy send me Apple's ISO 270XX certifications now?
Next time when you want to sign up for a VC backed service, remember how many times they pushed the companies behind the tools we use to this end leaving us holding the can.
Accounts with less than 10 users are free.
EDIT: Clarified that we've been remotely managing macs or the better part of a decade. The MDM piece is the new one.
Definitely not interested in your product now. Just FYI.
Never heard of them before, and will definitely avoid them in the future. How obnoxious.
However, I've never noticed those widgets lying to me and claiming that I've got a message waiting for me in order to steal my attention.
In addition, I'm not sure whether you are GDPR-compliant as claimed at https://jumpcloud.com/gdpr. Where's your Privacy Shield certification and who's your EU representative according to art. 27 GDPR?
Just launched, as it's been out for months, and working very well. And we've been at the forefront of remotely managing Mac systems for years prior to this, we just anticipate that Macs will continue to be locked down in a way that will remove the ability for management software to continue to do it's job if it isn't tightly integrated with MDM.
> Where's your Privacy Shield certification
https://jumpcloud.com/blog/jumpcloud-supports-eu-data-protec...
> who's your EU representative according to art. 27 GDPR
I'm not sure about the specifics of our GDPR compliance just being an engineer on a portion of the product that isn't in the backend, but can look into it and get back to you if you like. If you'd prefer to go through our main channels without an account sales@jumpcloud.com answers these questions.
Edit: It's unfortunate you're being downvoted for asking totally valid questions. I upvoted you to try and counteract it a bit.
It also has incorrect statements: "A simple attestation by the company along with referencing Privacy Shield creates compliance": No, really it does not.
So yes, would advise you to get a real DPO and Art 27 Rep in. They aren't expensive and with CCPA present now too, will likely be a good investment.
Our DPO can be reached at dpo@jumpcloud.com as is listed in our GDPR documentation above.
And (and to be clear this me me speaking, not the company, we've got a lot of brouhaha going on with WWDC, etc), but my understanding is that you don't need an Art 27 Rep if you have a physical presence in the EU and specify have a contactable DPO.
You are correct on their lack of an Art 27 Rep however.
A world in which an IT person or contractor is able to run amok with random bash scripts on a user's laptop in the name of "device management", without any controls whatsoever is horrible for privacy.
Does that mean JAMF is dead? I dont see how there would be a large enough market left once Apple enter the field to sustain their business.