Outside of margins, Apple also famously said (under Jobs) they had no interest in the enterprise because the users don’t choose the products there. They want to sell direct to their customers, and the way the OS works and behaves shows that. There’s MDMs, yeah, but you just don’t get the level of control you can with Windows at scale and it’s very much on purpose.

With enterprise, the users aren’t the ones choosing or even configuring their computers.

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SoftTalker 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Which is a bit strange because at NeXT, Jobs initially focused only on institutional (mostly .edu) customers and not end users. They included services like NetInfo for centralized configuration management.

I guess because NeXT ultimately failed as a business, he didn't repeat that approach upon returning to Apple?

Apple was also quite dominant in K-12 sales in the pre-internet era.

	▲	thewebguyd 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The quote I'm remembering from Jobs I thought was much earlier, but it came post-iPhone: > "What I love about the consumer market, that I always hated about the enterprise market, is that we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every person votes for themselves. They go 'yes' or 'no,' and if enough of them say 'yes,' we get to come to work tomorrow. That's how it works. It's really simple. With the enterprise market, it's not so simple. The people that use the products don't decide for themselves, and the people that make those decisions sometimes are confused. We love just trying to make the best products in the world for people and having them tell us by how they vote with their wallets whether we're on track or not." I'm wondering if the success of the iPhone kind of led to that line of thinking since it was primarily a consumer product anyway, it was Apple doubling down on it. Also makes sense though. "Enterprise" comes with a lot of baggage and support requirements that can really slow your product down and turn into a bloated mess of one-off features for one specific customer's use case. You're no longer making product decisions for what you want the product to be but instead your roadmap is driven by whatever the enterprise customers want.