Exactly. Apple benefited tremendously, especially after the Intel transition, from executives and younger employees showing up to the workplace with a shiny new MacBook Pro and just expecting it to work on the network. It started with those two groups and once IT found a way to support turn systems — or at least get them on the network/give them access to the file share — Apple didn’t need to do a lot of the glad handing for enterprise sales. If the CEO wants to use his Mac at work, IT will capitulate. And that in turn dovetailed with the broader BYOD movement with computers and phones.

Now, Xserve didn’t work for a lot of reasons, but Apple exited the server market, and even stopped making the Server variant of macOS (even though it was just a handful of utilities at the end), largely because I think it realized two things:

1. It could never truly compete with Linux (and to a lesser degree, IIS) without making significant tradeoffs that are anathema to Apple (lowering prices significantly, giving up usage control, and decoupling vertically integrated hardware/software).

2. The cost of truly making a B2B play would require resource investments and commitments into an area Apple doesn’t need to care about and that would come at the expense of areas that are both more profitable and less of a PITA.

Apple is the richest company in the world and amongst the most profitable tech companies, why would they bother with enterprise when they can allow partners to deal with the integration side and focus on doing their stuff their way.

(There is one notable instance where Apple embraced enterprise, and that was when Apple added Exchange support in iPhone OS and admittedly, this was a huge deal and was ultimately a fatal blow to Blackberry. But it’s the exception that almost proves the rule. Apple added support for Exchange but left it up to others to figure out the broader MDM situations.)

Having said all that, I have always been surprised Apple hasn’t offered some sort of build/test service themselves and integrated it into TestFlight. It could be a driver for the all-important services revenue (in my imagination, the annual developer fee would cover a certain number of build minutes a month and then additional minutes would cost money). I have to think that such a solution is either in the works or that Apple looked at the support challenges and just decided to let other people do it at scale for them.

The thing is that much of the cloud is very much a commodity and Apple has successfully made its products and services anything but a commodity.