I totally agree, but I have to wonder if Apple's ready to make that foray into the land of IT yet.
On the software side, Apple certainly has the goods with MacOSX.1. There's a real webserver in there, along with PHP goodness, SSH, and a raft of free (as in freedom) software in the offing for putting database servers (MySQL), Application servers (with PHP, or possibly better, Tomcat), and directory servers (OpenLDAP). So what's missing? The really heavy stuff. I'd like to see some bigger players on board. Oracle, BEA, IBM, and yes, even Sun/iPlanet would be a HUGE vote of confidence for the platform and give it real credibility in the larger IT shops. I'd love to plop my G4 on the corpnet and show it off, running WebLogic at 1/2 the cost of the Solaris boxen that are currently there. But I can't. The hardware simply hasn't caught up.
Where's our rack-mount machines? Where's our quad-proc boxen (or eight, for that matter)? Or, if that's to much to ask for, then why are we
still limited to 1.5GB of memory, even on the most mighty of the new boxes. At the current prices, I can max out my machine's memory and barely make my Amex card break a sweat. I can stripe a bunch of FW drives and put a Terabyte of drive space on my machine, no problem, but I'm still limited to a mere 1.5 gigs of RAM.
Make no mistake, this exactly the sort of arena that Microsoft wants to rule with .NET, and if Apple really wants to take them on, the hardware has to get better to have real credibility in the enterprise.
That's not to say the MacOSX machines aren't terrific desktop machines, they are. And they can serve very nicely in the workgroup/small business space right now. For that matter, I have a Linux machine that's served as a house server for the last several years that will probably be replaced with my old G4 when I upgrade. But enterprise-ready? Apple isn't there yet. Why not?
The most likely reason I can think of is that they're doing pretty well with their current focus - the digital hub. The digital hub concept really only applies in a desktop environment, and so they've (for good or ill) apparently decided that not much else matters at the moment. This may change over the coming year or so, depending on whether Motorola can keep up and actually produce the G5 or e500's (or whatever) in quantity enough to build some machines that have the more-than-2 processors (and more memory) that's neccessary to take it to the "next level". But, I'm guessing that none of this is going to happen until at least MWNY... 2003.
As always, my $0.02. Make change as appropriate...
