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Will Apple's Lion Roar For Business?
An anonymous reader writes "Apple has long had a troubled relationship with IT departments. Any creative professional will testify just how hard it can be to convince IT managers to allow the use of Macs in Windows-dominated environments. And, despite the fact that the Mac OS is now quite a well-behaved client on Windows LANs, Apple sometimes does little to help its own cause. The decision to release OS10.7, or Lion, for download only is hardly going to endear Apple to IT managers who need to conserve network resources. Most of all, IT departments would want to see the Mac OS offering full support for virtualization, on the desktop and on the server. There are rumors that Apple will, itself, run a virtualized version of Mac OS under VMware as part of its iCloud product. Allowing OS X to run as a guest on non-Apple servers, and even on the desktop under VDI, would bring enormous administrative benefits to companies using Macs."
Apple has pretty good enterprise tools, directory support, image deployment. What I have noticed in my organization is that Windows admins simply don't want to investigate. We have an Apple rep (engineer) that gives free classes on anything we want and still the Windows admins complain Lion needs a 3rd party (expensive) full disk encryption, special programs to integrate with Active Directory and can't be imaged.
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Apple does their own design, they employ hardware engineers who design the circuits on their boards. FoxConn takes those designs and turns them into PCs. Other PC shops like Dell just send a list of requirements to FoxConn who designs in whatever is cheapest and yet meets specs. Apple outsourced the assembly labour, Dell outsourced both that and the engineering labour.