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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

This makes total sense because I’ve seen first hand Apple lose whole office Mac contracts because the business has no one who can administer a fleet of Macs like they can Windows machines. Everyone always talks about Dell/Lenovo being cheaper but after doing the purchasing they’re really not — you can buy less for less sure, but the difference for comparable laptops is negligible when budgets start rounding to the nearest 5 zeros. Ecosystems matter at lot more and there is remarkably little information on Apple’s MDM solutions like Jamf where AD and InTune are turnkey by comparison.

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I was surprised they didn't have this 10-15 years ago. I sort of wonder if Jobs had lived if he'd had pivoted towards this enterprise/support direction.

I'd guess he would have. Jobs cared about professional users, and not just in film, graphic design, and music. Many decisions these past years feel like the company has not seen the need to invest in enterprise users and especially not enterprise fleet management.

Jobs cared about professional users but never cared much about enterprise.

There's a good quote in this 2010 article: https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-steve-jobs-hates-about-th...

>"What I love about the consumer market, that I always hated about the enterprise market, is that we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every person votes for themselves. They go 'yes' or 'no,' and if enough of them say 'yes,' we get to come to work tomorrow. That's how it works. It's really simple. With the enterprise market, it's not so simple. The people that use the products don't decide for themselves, and the people that make those decisions sometimes are confused. We love just trying to make the best products in the world for people and having them tell us by how they vote with their wallets whether we're on track or not."

I mean, if they had solutions that compete with what the other market has, then companies can support both.

This professional training would help with that. It's not necessarily that things aren't available. Sometimes it's just not having someone that knows how to.

The motivations of enterprises and individuals are different. Trying to please both or compromise between them creates worse outcomes for the individual users. The choices you make when interests conflict lowers quality.

Indeed. And there's another side that we used to discuss - many folks have negative associations with the gear they use at work because of the way they're managed by IT orgs. Compare a Windows box with a heavy-handed AV setup etc with the same tier of hardware with a stock OS install - the stock version is often a lot more responsive/usable. (And obviously the IT dept may have its reasons for locking down, but that's besides the point.)

Due to near-dominance of iPhone/iPads, Apple doesn't have a problem getting mindshare these days, so brand familiarity (which could be an offsetting benefit of a stronger enterprise presence) is not much of a problem.

I’m not so sure about this, my Windows at home is a stock one and it randomly inserts junk into my Start menu and comes with crapware. The one I use at work has full-time admins to protect me from this garbage. I bought the Windows box to do only one thing (be essentially a dumb terminal to connect to work) but even using Windows for a task this small is such a bad experience that if I had it to do over I would just spend the extra money and get a Mac Mini.

You need to get Windows Enterprise or Windows Education if you want to dramatically reduce the quantity of bloat that Microsoft flings at you which are $$$.

Theres a fair amount of quotes I'm too lazy to find now where Jobs expresses his absolute distain for the "enterprise" market.

With enterprise software, the end user is almost never the actual paying customer, which when you are trying to make really end-user focused products that delight in the way Apple do, can lead to incentives that prioritise enterprise needs over consumer - look at the huge number of enterprise specific features Microsoft historically have built, that have affected consumers too. Jobs loved making consumer products so much, I can't imagine he ever would have been able to really chase enterprise customers.

The move to targeting services and enterprise more at Apple happened under Cook, because, well, he has to continue growing the company and Services + more engagement with enterprise markets have been critical to growth post Jobs under Cook. Perhaps Steve ultimately would have done the same as Cook, given iPhone can't grow forever etc, but it would have been a major shift in his opinions/outlook for Apple.

I'm talking about "Enterprise" in the traditional software industry sense, which is not the same industry apple target for creative professionals, even if tools like MDM etc can overlap. Jobs loved "professional" users in creative industries, not enterprise volume sales and fleet management tools etc etc.

Even worse than the Enterprise things that made their way into Microsoft's consumer products are the things that Microsoft rejected that enterprise wanted. Raymond Chen mentions these requests often in his 'The Old New Thing' blog. I can imagine Jobs going ballistic on enterprise customers who make one too many of these requests (and in some cases, the first request might be that one too many).

Steve jobs got burnt by enterprise customers at NeXT. Once he got burnt he had a habit of pivoting away and never revisiting a subject.

Which is a shame NeXT (apple) had a world leading ORM and RPC system in 1990. It would still impress people today.

I dunno about that. The ORM was DatabaseKit? That didn't make into OS X, but if DO is the RPC system, that was available in Mac OS X. It was full of security holes and was prone to deadlocks.

I also suspect people raised alongside ubiquitous web 2.0 technology would be a lot less impressed with the NeXT demos than all of us who saw them with pre-web eyes.

I was thinking enterprise objects framework which came after they realized databasekit was a dud.

It’s equivalent to rails or similar orms. But it integrated with interface builder. See this [1] demo about 23 minutes in… just after he demos how great next step handles faces. He demos building a query crud app fully drag n drop.

Are you sure DO was available in OS X?

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4UiGnpmwAJk

They did! I'm an Apple Certified Support Professional and Server Administrator (10.5 and 10.6). They had a whole series of certifications you could get, just like Microsoft (though not as extensive). Those all went by the wayside when they started dropping their enterprise products (Mac OS X Server, Xserve) to the point I'm not even sure what existed before this announcement (haven't been an admin in 12 years at this point).

On a related note, once I took the tests for the SP and SA certifications (in 2009), my name was supposed to show up on Apple's site for certified professionals. This was important, as any employer would check that list to make sure your certifications were up to date. Apparently that process wasn't automatic, as I wasn't on the list after three months. One email to steve@apple.com later and I was on the site!

Now that almost all non-tech-applications are web-based, is there any need for IT to admin your system like they used to?

Usually in many organisations it’s a case of enforcing compliance across the fleet as opposed to actively administering the machines; enforcing browser profiles, software deployments and configurations, OS patch revisions, directory services integrations, that sort of thing.

But yes many computer workers effectively use their systems like chromebooks. Hell I’m in an operations role and aside from my terminal and mail client, I use my system like a glorified chromebook hah

Well basically in the Windows world you have user management, files and printing, security/patching and then taking care of programs on the user's computers and infrastructure (servers, setting up a VPN etc.).

Depending on the organization, there are many non web-based programs that are run. Think about an engineering company. They'll probably have some sort of CAD like SolidWorks and something like Matlab etc.

Even if everything would be web based you still have to handle licensing/logins somehow. But yeah in theory the users need less hand holding because less stuff is actually installed.

Vast majority of the things you list seem like a very legacy way to do things.

If you have to list 'printers' to give an example then you know it might not be as relevant these days.

Any decent sized organization, even ones that don't have regulatory compliance to worry about, has to deal with the majority of things listed. My company has roughly 200 Macs in use, around 5% of the total endpoints in use. The admins who specialize in this have to worry primarily about patch management, application deployment, and security. Authentication is through AD, so any changes that might affect this have to be done carefully. And yes, printing is still a big deal.

> worry primarily about patch management

Don’t the OS and app prompt for their own updates these days?

You don't want the whole office to be out of work for a day because the last Nvidia update broke some professional software your techs are using. This lets you test the patch on some machines before rolling it out to your whole org.

Sure but users can decline them and never reboot

There’s no way an enterprise can follow the consumer cadence for patches and updates. There are dozens if not hundreds of custom apps that could break

Hoping for the best is not how compliance works.

I'm not being obtuse - but if you can't trust your employees to run the updates they're asked to, then what are you able to trust them with?

Your employees have deliverables. Maybe they're customer facing. Maybe they're not directly customer facing.

But the incentive structure may prioritize getting their deliverables done over doing patching at least in the short term. The corporate hierarchies for IT and their main organization might only have a common manager at the very top of the company.

They do, but people don't click on the "do the update" button so you need a way to force it for compliance reasons. And sometimes you want to withhold an update if it breaks an important app, etc.

I hate printers with every fiber of my being, but for certain companies they are unavoidable. We run our own fulfillment center rather than use 3rd party logistics, and there is absolutely no way we could operate without them. If the printers in the warehouse go down, then I have to explain why customers aren't getting orders fulfilled and we have hourly employees waiting for me to fix things. Not everyone works in an office.

That being said, if the printer in the office has issues I may not even hear about it for a month...

Security.

Like VPNs, app store policies, user-creation, All of this needs a decent understanding of the OS and a config management system to implement it.

The problem with OSX is that most release change things, often in undocumented ways. Like breaking how AD integrates (thanks 10.6)

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