Smart to focus on smaller businesses but foolish albeit expected to only include Apple products in the solution. I'd put money on the overwhelming majority of businesses that have any Apple devices also have non Apple devices. Very few will be purely Apple environments and those that are would hardly qualify as enterprise environments. The reason is simple, Apple has failed to provide the needed suite of enterprise solutions to allow a company to build themselves around their ecosystem. You can do it in the home but Apple doesn't sell servers anymore or allow anyone to develop server products for them.
> Smart to focus on smaller businesses but foolish albeit expected to only include Apple products in the solution.
Eh, it depends why you think they are doing it.
If you think they are offering this because they want to get into selling MDM software, then yeah, it's foolish.
If, on the other hand, you imagine that they are offering this because they want to encourage small businesses to go 'wall-to-wall' Apple, and for a benefit of this to be that if you go 'Apple' you effectively have some level of a technical support contract too with on-site hardware repairs (not really offered in a compelling way by any other hardware vendor), then it might not be so foolish from a commercial perspective.
I suspect it's the latter - make going 'all in' on Apple a super appealing proposition for small businesses.
The second thing is, Windows is very appealing for small businesses because, amongst other things, configuration and management of users, sign ins, security policies e.t.c. through AAD / Office 365 is brilliant, so this seems to close the gap a bit.
> Apple doesn't sell servers anymore or allow anyone to develop server products for them.
This seems to be more like an MDM/device management and user management/onboarding solution, not something you would install or use to manage servers.
It also seems like a progression for this product would go from "All Apple" to "Mixed Use". No need to lose the "All Apple" money while you're working on the "Mixed Use" software if you're going to take that road.
> Smart to focus on smaller businesses but foolish albeit expected to only include Apple products in the solution.
Apple isn't here to be end-all-be-all for their customers. They are there to sell products and services that make sense for their customers.
If others undercut them or provide more comprehensive service, then that's a market Apple has decided not to compete in now. Good for their competitors.
