What did we do wrong? Was it something we said or something we didn’t do? What failing of ours was worse than all others to warrant you ignoring the fact that there is an enterprise market out there? Honestly, if its something we did, we want to know about it so we can make up for whatever bad thing we don’t know we did. Hell, we must have done something to piss Steve off, because the enterprise is simply ignored by Apple. Sure, they pander to us in the form of Apple-branded 1U rackmount servers as sleek and powerful as their appearance suggests, but they don’t care for us.

So it must be that Apple doesn’t have a corporate identity which it can expose to the world. Any good company which serves enterprise has a clear identity. They certainly get banged around a lot by competition, but you can’t buy an identity like Cisco has, very well known for their enterprise switching equipment. Cisco made complex networking solutions when people needed them, and that built their identity for them. Apple, so far, has chosen to completely ignore the fact that it even sells servers. The XServe is like Apple’s red-headed stepchild.

Its not that Apple doesn’t make a distinction, though. They have recently unveiled a version of the Mac Mini which is designed to be a tiny, desktop server, but that doesn’t give them enterprise cred. It gives them cred with the SMBs who were already using Mac Minis as servers. Now you can just buy one all ready to go. That’s fine, really. Its not much of an identity, but Apple seems to think they can get by with that. Meanwhile, they have these ridiculously kickass XServe’s sitting around with no real market identity around them and no real marketing campaign to push them. The XServe isn’t even that expensive, as servers go.

So, my question is, why does Apple deserve to sell servers? Why don’t they just shut that one-horse town down and move on to the CE space where they really want to be. I have a feeling they might, but I’d like to see them try before just giving up. All they need to do is get the word out that Apple servers are prime for small to medium sized virtualization projects, MAMP-based server farms, and are a fantastic alternative to a Windows-based domain controller in Mac shops. I have to say, though, that its telling how many Mac shops I see which have Windows-based servers.

I can’t really imagine that Apple is pleased with that. I have a feeling that Steve Jobs just puts it out of his mind and acts like its not there. That kind of treatment didn’t work for the red-headed stepchild, either.

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