Jon Alper's probably insufficiently humble opinion

Apple’s killed Xserve. They’ve pledged support for the service life of the machines currently in the field or bought before January 31st 2011. They’ve pledged OSX Sever support on Mac mini and Mac Pro. They only mention Snow Leopard Server no mention of Lion Server which is, in silence, damning.

http://images.apple.com/xserve/pdf/L422277A_Xserve_Guide.pdf

They’ve made a very, very bad move.

It’s pretty obvious from this move that Xserve was not a high volume or ‘successful’ product unto itself. That success, measured only in revenue and margin of the XServe product line was likely pretty bleak.. The problem is, sales, profits on XServe as a product is not how Apple needs to measure XServe’s value to the company.

XServe was, in part, a means of justifying a place for Macs in corporate I.T. That the product existed said something corporate I.T. needed to hear from Apple in order for the Mac to be allowed at work.  I do mean allowed. If you have never worked in a corporate environment, dealt with corporate I.T. thinking, never been the ‘guy who supports those weirdo designer and video people’, you have no earthly notion of the proactive steps certain sorts of people will take to get Apple products off their campus by any means necessary. And yes, even  now, maybe more now, with the consumer-focus of Apple’s balance sheet.

The current model XServe is actually, in small part, the result of a ‘listening tour’ Apple did with some corporate clients including a former employer of mine, One of the features loudly advocated for by a colleague was Lights Out Management (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2773) and Apple responded. Surely not just to his feedback but to what was likely feedback they got from many many other similarly able sys admins like my then colleague. The issue wasn’t so much how many potential clients would actually use lights out management but how many of those with purchase approval power would perceive that, by including LOM, Apple was serious about MacOS in the Enterprise.

More to the point than that was Apple’s investing the resources, the staff, in making the trip to what was a major customer and making them feel heard. That my colleague saw his suggestions show up in a new product helped Apple begin to regain their foothold there. Apple sold a lot of iMacs and Mac Pros to that company since then. By a lot, I mean significant hundreds and this was hardly a large company or even a shadow of a major higher education site.

In canceling Xserve, and presumably and more importantly scaling back the staff involved dedicated to supporting and evangelizing OS X as a server platform and full peer in business. Apple isn’t just shedding an unprofitable and tangential product, they are jeopardizing sales to academia, research institutions and medium sized business. In doing that, they jeopardize sales of all Macs and from there, iOS devices across all markets.

Killing XServe without a forward looking indication of Apple’s commitment to I.T. in business is a capital B bad thing.

I.T. people, if they’re actually competent I.T. people, are a paranoid bunch. We like contingency plans. We like backup. We like automation. We like fault tolerance and high availability. 5 Mac minis without an Apple supported clustering and HA solution is not a viable solution to an XServe with duel power supplies and fault tolerance on disk. A Mac Pro consumes absurd volumes of space in some of the most expensive real estate in the world. A fire-suppressed, raised floor, redundantly cooled, UPS and generator powered machine room could be the most expensive, by cubic inch, space in the world.

By killing XServe, Apple is saying they don’t understand and are not interested in I.T. people. The problem with that? If Apple’s not interested in I.T. people they won’t be interested in Apple and all the gains Apple has made as a respected peer platform in mixed OS environments are in jeopardy.

If a company’s I.T. department won’t support a Mac on their LAN, they won’t support a Mac used to connect via VPN from home. Their users will be right back to “I can’t buy a Mac because I can’t use one at work and I can’t even get permission to use mine at home to do my work from home. I have to buy a PC.”

As much as Apple may want iPad and iPhone to be their primary high volume bread winners, they can’t afford to kill the Mac. They need the Mac to be the development platform for iOS. They need the Mac to be the “one sure bet your iOS products will work smoothly with” for customers. The potential community for developers can’t be left to hope iOS dev tools will install on Windows. Apple needs the Mac and the Mac still needs to be a viable computing platform, not an appliance. That means a developer needs to want to use a Mac. The Mac must stay a viable platform. The only way that happens is if Apple invests just enough to insure the Mac is a full peer platform for business use.

Apple can mitigate some of the costs that prevented XServe hardware from being a viable product by expanding the market for the hardware and throwing away the cost of an additional logic board design. They can reach a market under-served by the incredibly deep and somewhat physically delicate XServe 1U design  by rethinking the Mac Pro.

A new ‘Mac Pro-Rack’ and commitment to the OS X Sever software platform.

Mac Pro-Rack is a variation on the current damned near perfect enclosure design of the Mac Pro. It is, now, no taller than it it could be wide to slide into a rack (with the handles removed).  There appears to be very little about the internals that demand vertical orientation for proper cooling. The optical drives could be rotated 90 degrees at the, worst case, expense of access to one slot PCI slot. Dual Power supplies, there’s room for or make an external second supply with DC inputs an option. Hell, make Mac Pro-Rack a bolt on kit for a redesigned horizontal or vertical Mac Pro. When used as a workstation? Smooth top and bottom, front and rear facing (rather than top and bottom) handles. When used in a rack? Bolt on optional ears and rails after removing a piece of sexy Apple-designed trim.

No, clearly it’s not literally this easy. ruggedizing for use in a mobile rack, thermal management and rack hardware of course demand engineering resources but the point is, it’s possible for Apple to have a shared logic board design for their pro workstations and a rack mountable product and mitigate the development  costs of ‘specific for use as a server’ hardware. A good 4U rack mountable Mac Pro is of value to use in an I.T. server rack and in media production markets. (and military, security and field research applications as well).

Build this dream hardware or not, Apple can not afford to simply dump their visible interest in supporting Apple in  enterprise environments. It may be a cost bit but, without visible effort on Apple’s part? Again, Microsoft, Oracle or others will be able to edge the Mac out of a place on the corporate approved purchase list. Apple needs a continuing story about the suitability of the Mac as an all purpose platform.

Apple won’t make money selling Xserves. They will make less money selling Macs without a product in XServe’s niche. There needs to be a visible plan and commitment. The will make less money selling iOS without the Mac and, long term, without the Mac, iOS is doomed. iOS is not a ‘making things’ platform.

I know how to use Photoshop. I know things about Photoshop that some of the most brilliantly talented and award winning advanced degree’d amazing designers I know don’t know about Photoshop. I’m pretty damned good at sharpening pencils with a pocket knife too. Doesn’t mean I can draw.

I’m hardly visually clueless, I’m a photographer, by some definitions a professional photographer*, and, not to blow my own horn (to much),  I am a pretty damned good lighting designer because that was my profession for more than a decade.

What I am not is a graphic designer or illustrator. No matter how often I do it when the stakes are low and I can get by, sort of, I am not the right guy to do that job. I can be the right guy to work with designers, even to manage them on a project but I’m not the right guy to do it. When you need visual designer or an illustrator, hire one. Don’t kid yourself into thinking that because you know how to use the tools, or think you do, that you have the talent or training to do a job that’s at least as complex, refined, subtle and demanding of expert skills as being a PHP and MySQL coder.

A ‘web designer’ is a non-existent creature. There are graphic and UE designers, Illustrators, UE coders and back-end coders. There are Producers, there are Writers and there are Editors. Anyone who claims to be all of those things isn’t. Being multi-talented isn’t being multi-expert. Are you of more benefit to your team if you have more than one skill? Of course! Are you the team? No.

Contrary to intuition, it’s NOT more cost effective to hire a ‘web designer’ than it is to hire a producer, designer and developer who can work together. It’s only cheaper. Cheaper as in shoddy and a bad investment. Cheaper as in, you’ll fail or pay for a do-over.

Thanks to one of the most talented designer/illustrators I know for letting me hire him to render, well, me.

Rick Pinchera rocks! Know what the most fun aspect of this was? Not giving him any photo to reference or feedback to make him iterate and just letting him see me as he remembered. It’s depressingly faithful (I really do have a that good a face for radio) and it’s marvelously whimsical. Thank you Rick!

* Some define ‘professional photographer” as a person who gets paid to take photographs. I prefer the narrower, definition; someone who earns their primary livelihood taking photographs and that is not me.

http://www.pbs.org/godinamerica/ the home of a recent Frontline, American Experience production of “God In America” for WGBH and PBS gets a lot right from an ‘understanding new media’ perspective. This is an incredibly welcome change from some other recent offerings and is well worth a serious look.

Particularly noteworthy are the very richly populated and sans Flash timeline feature, the full texts of the interviews, the link to the Pew religious knowledge quiz and the “God in the White House” feature.

The only glaring and, to me anyway, offensive aspect is the presumption in the ‘Faithbook’ that atheism isn’t on an equal footing with theism. The emotional experience one could call ‘spiritual’ is hardly inherently coupled with a belief in a god or gods. One has a right, especially in the US, not to believe in god as much as one has a right to choose which god to believe in and it’s a shame to me that this partly tax-payer funded project seems unwilling and unable to acknowledge that. That, however, is an editorial issue not a web implementation issue.

Major, major kudos to Sam Bailey and team. (scroll to the bottom here for web credits).

Of course Sam and I would bash heads on some details: No overview for the timeline? No captions or ready transcript link from the video player? But those matters for quibble and debate aside, this is what it should be. A home for a documentary film online that meaningfully adds value and potential for understanding the content using the web for what it’s so good at.