Is Apple going to become hostile to corporate users?

[zorinlynx]

By "corporate" I mean installations where an IT department takes care of a large number of workstations, whether at a business or school, where users log in and use network resources.

I ask this because I see them concentrating on things that simply don't work in a corporate environment. Like the App Store, and distributing Lion via the App Store.

It feels like Mac OS X may eventually move away from being a suitable OS for deployment in these environments. I remember back in the day Apple had a whole support structure for corporate environments, with stuff like network installs. These days they rarely ever say a word about it.

Any thoughts?

 

[mrapplegate]

By "corporate" I mean installations where an IT department takes care of a large number of workstations, whether at a business or school, where users log in and use network resources.

I ask this because I see them concentrating on things that simply don't work in a corporate environment. Like the App Store, and distributing Lion via the App Store.

It feels like Mac OS X may eventually move away from being a suitable OS for deployment in these environments. I remember back in the day Apple had a whole support structure for corporate environments, with stuff like network installs. These days they rarely ever say a word about it.

Any thoughts?

Just because Lion will be delivered by the App store does not mean that corp IT users will have to deploy that way.

 

[TwistedPain]

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Apple and Microsoft will never become "hostile" to the corporate world. The corporate world purchases quite a bit. However, yes the IT field is going to evolve soon. IT as we know it in the corporate world will become less and less useful. There's a few excellent articles out there (not specific to just apple). I read one the other day concerning office 365, which talked about how keeping IT staff for the purpose of exchange servers would eventually become pointless when office 365 comes around, due to how user friendly it is.

 

[Blipp]

I'd say the exact opposite as Apple has recently started an enterprise support team. From my dealings with them it's a really hard job to have as they find out about most new software and hardware the same time as the general public, have no future road map (a nightmare for the enterprise) and basically have all of Apple's secrecy quirks holding them back from actually supporting an enterprise the way they would like to. I know that sounds like it supports your point but I can see that things are changing, all be it slowly. The enterprise team is very open to our concerns about dealing with some of Apple's funky policies and they are taking these concerns back to Apple. We've already seen some of our concerns on the iOS side of things start to change both in announced features and a few things we've been told are coming with a wink and a nod. It's never going to be as fully supported as MS and they're always going to be a consumer company first forcing us to deal with some consumer based policies but they're definitely opening up.