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I have only seen + heard the opposite about Apple cutting back on enterprise sales of any kind. (Up until two-ish years ago, they made very little outreach to e

I have only seen + heard the opposite about Apple cutting back on enterprise sales of any kind. (Up until two-ish years ago, they made very little outreach to enterprise at all, just because they don't do roadmaps, don't have special support for "enterprise," etc.) Your retail-business theory is what I thought of as Apple's old strategy. They just engaged Unisys to support and infiltrate the enterprise (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-25/apple-enlists-unisys-to-crack-nut-with-pc-based-corporate-u-s-agencies.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-25/apple-enlists-unisy...) I'm not saying your interpretation of the Xserve discontinuation is wrong, just that i hadn't seen anybody with that interpretation before, and i'd love to hear more.

zdw 16y ago
My sources are in Apple Retail, and from what I can piece together, Apple's enterprise sales is truly becoming that - going after Fortune 500 companies, when previously if you had more than 50-100 people and/or computers you were fair game for the enterprise department. Thus, their enterprise department is shrinking, but becoming more focused. In the past, there was a lot of poaching of deals between departments within Apple - retail would make a deal for >30 machines with an organization, only to have Enterprise call the customer up (they share CRM) and offer the exact same deal with a price below what Retail was allowed to discount. It's an internal org chart change, as far as I can tell. Why have dedicated enterprise reps in a phone center somewhere that can't have a face-to-face interaction with the customer, when in a lot of areas there's a retail store that can provide that, and get halo sales to employees, etc.