Apple certainly knows and understands consumers. What the company just can't figure out is the enterprise. While the iPhone does now support Microsoft Exchange server, a huge win for corporate Mac lovers, that's about as far as the company is willing to go, it seems. There's no sign of any sort of refresh for Apple's xServes, nor for its rack-mount RAID systems. Sure, they'll bump up the specs, but the actual device and its underlying operating system aren't exactly the bell of Apple's ball.

This is fairly typical of Apple. Sometimes, the company just dabbles in markets instead of going after them full bore. This is the case with the Apple TV. Such was the case with the company's long dead, but ever languishing printer offerings. And now it's the fate of its servers.

 Remember when the xServe was soooo cool because it was the first rack-mountable Mac? Remember when, a few years later, high performance compute labs were striping down desktop G5s and rack mounting them? Remember when Apple's first G4 server was just like the desktop model in size  and shape?

That's because Apple will always see its place in the enterprise as being a single server or two crammed full of video and music clips. And perhaps that's appropriate. As Sun Microsystems has learned, there's not much room for designer hardware outside of the department of defense. 

Still, it's a shame Apple treats business users as third class citizens, because there is so much room for improvement on corporate desktops, still. Lord knows, Linux isn't make much of a headway there, either. Chalk it up to Apple picking its battles. That's the most important part of a war, evidently.

Does that mean xServes amount to cardboard tanks on the beaches around Normandy?