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Comment by dfabulich | Hacker News Reader

Strategically, Apple's not setting themselves up for success here by giving Apple Business away for free (with paid per-user storage bumps).

As a lot of people on this thread have pointed out, Apple's Business Manager needs a lot of improvements. ("Bring your own device" support is terrible, for example. Changing business names requires a perilous migration step. Support reps don't have the tools to fix serious issues.)

If Apple Business were a real revenue source, if they charged luxury prices for a luxurious business support experience, they could pay for developers to fix their stuff.

Instead, Apple Business is a free side hustle for Apple, a hobby. But they're proposing to control your entire domain, to Domain Lock all Apple accounts for your domain, to put your businesses's life in their hands, for "free."

Don't fall for it.

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> If Apple Business were a real revenue source, if they charged luxury prices for a luxurious business support experience, they could pay for developers to fix their stuff.

Apple can already easily afford those developers. They’re not exactly running at a loss ;)

Plus given how each new iteration of macOS and iOS is a steady step backwards for usability, I don’t have a huge amount of trust in their abilities to fix Business if it had become a strategic product tomorrow.

The reality is that every business unit needs to justify its existence and when asking for headcount, it’s easier to point to a revenue stream you’re tied to rather than “we help sell some things to businesses”

Are you sure Apple does their accounting in that way?

Do you have a reason to believe they don’t? We’re not talking about some weird or obscure custom, it’s just basic business ideas.

I think the burden of evidence is with you in this case. It doesn't make sense for Apple to do their accounting with such a method.

Apple famously doesn't have conventional business units.

https://www.apple.com/careers/pdf/HBR_How_Apple_Is_Organized...

Thanks for this. For someone like me who hasn't worked inside Apple, it's very useful information.

If that were the case, the only business units that would ever be get funding would be the hardware sales.

Even with AWS I doubt many of the service teams make enough money to justify their existence alone.

I don’t disagree with that. But equally most business units in Apple are not tied to revenue streams. From R&D though to developers for other non-subscription software. And that’s before you then factor in the non-delivery team (eg finance, HR, lawyers, etc).

So it’s not like a review stream is a requirement.

Moreover, even back when they did have back office tooling as a revenue stream (eg OSX Server), Apple still left it to slowly rot before finally discontinuing it.

So I just don’t think this is something anyone’s Apple cares enough about. If they did, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation to begin with.

You’re not thinking it through. There’s a rich enterprise ecosystem for MDM. Microsoft, Google, Omnissa, IBM, etc.

They don’t want to compete with those partners, and wouldn’t be effective if they did. But, there’s a gap of smaller companies and institutions where they benefit from MDM capabilities but don’t have the budget or wherewithal to even know how to shop for MDM.

So they spend a bit of money, give Apple Store reps something to do and add an incentive to buy another iPhone.

"If Apple Business were a real revenue source, if they charged luxury prices for a luxurious business support experience, they could pay for developers to fix their stuff. Instead, Apple Business is a free side hustle for Apple, a hobby."

I'm wrestling with something similar to this right now in Linux. The only real player that charges "enough" to have a "absolutely zero tolerance for base OS breakage" approach to OS development is Red Hat. Ubuntu LTS is more widespread but only really because it's $0 even for large businesses, and that's honestly reflected in it sometimes having hardware breakage during a version's initial two year mainstream support run. Having Windows's business backed level of "doesn't break" on hardware is rare on Linux.

Agreed, and honestly, I’m put off by the freeness because I agree it means that support will be nothing, just the Tier 1 call center reps who can read you scripts of how to hold down the power button to reset your computer, etc.

And I’d be very skeptical any business user anywhere can skate by on the iCloud Free Tier. Of all the stingy free tiers, it’s that one.

If they cared, they would make a Teams/Slack equivalent, a Zoom Killer, maybe a Confluence Killer, and charge per head, and offer storage tiers comparable to what MS and GOOG do.

(And no, don’t even joke that Messages and FaceTime are Slack and Zoom killers.)

Seems like par for the course for a product launch like this. I'll see where they are in a year.

Who would pay them for it before "developers fixed their stuff"?

People fooled by an expectation of quality extrapolated from their end-user experience. Alternatively, people who have to carry out orders from managers who never have to interact with it personally.

The way it works is that Apple would have committed more resources if the projected outcome was more revenue. By choosing to approach it as a free option, they committed a free option's worth of resourcing to it.

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