Comment by ghaff
Comment by ghaff 21 hours ago
Xserve was always kind of a loss. Wrote a piece about it a number of years back. It became pretty much a commodity business--which isn't Apple.
Comment by ghaff 21 hours ago
Xserve was always kind of a loss. Wrote a piece about it a number of years back. It became pretty much a commodity business--which isn't Apple.
How is server hardware more "commodity" than MacBook laptops? Both are quite sophisticated and tailored to their audience in nuanced ways; both are manufactured at scale and face fierce competition. I don't think Xserve was a uniquely commodity business, it was a B2B service business--which isn't Apple.
By that definition, Apple is absolutely in the commodity products business.
I'd rather say IBM got cannibalized by "financial engineers", this wasn't a decision made because of "it's a commodity".
There used to be a time when IBM actually meant quality (that's where "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" came from, after all), but nowadays? A loooot of stuff is either sold (Thinkpad went to Lenovo, Lotus Notes to HCL), faded into irrelevancy outside of extremely few niche markets (anything mainframe), got left for dead (the PC - it used to be called "IBM compatible personal computer"!) or got spun off (Kyndryl).
According to Wikipedia, IBM has 282.000 employees worldwide. What the fuck are all of these people doing?
The no one ever got fired for buying IBM wasn’t about quality. It’s always safe to buy the default choice that everyone else uses. Especially when things go wrong.
Many want to be founders here on HN don’t get that. Even if your product is better and cheaper, there is too much of a reputational risk signing a contract for a B2B SaaS product with an unknown vendor.
On a completely unrelated note, for the love of all that is holy don’t try to do B2B SaaS without SSO support.
Apple just announced it
I always wondered what they were hoping for with their server products back when they had them. Consumers and end users benefit greatly from the vertical integration that Apple is good at. This doesn't translate with servers. Commodity hardware + linux is not only cheaper, its often easier, and was definitely less proprietary.
Its also a race to the bottom type scenario. Apple would have never been able to keep up with server release schedules.
Was an interesting but ultimately odd moment of history for servers.