We were one of the first Xserve customers (Xserve and Xserve RAID).
I do agree it was an experiment. Unless someone has firsthand knowledge, we won’t know if it was someone’s pet project, a market they wanted to be in to dominate Dell, IBM, etc.
However, I would not call it a failed experiment. One of the largest supercomputers (at the time) was an Xserve cluster. Nothing about the experiment failed.
I will tell you that Steve Jobs was not a fan of the Xserve product line. He did not support it, which meant its days were numbered. He stated Apple was a consumer company. Not a business enterprise company. The Xserve teams were soon disbanded not soon afterwards.
Without any inside knowledge--and I'd have to revisit a piece I wrote at the time during my prior analyst stint--it always felt like a bit of a sideline/experiment. There were a lot of dynamics going on at the time. Linux was really exploding (and improving). There was a lot of consumerization (especially on mobile) happening within enterprise IT; Apple didn't need to become an enterprise IT company to effectively reap a lot of the benefits both directly and indirectly. Servers were increasingly commoditizing onto dual socket x86 (with some outliers).
I do agree it was an experiment. Unless someone has firsthand knowledge, we won’t know if it was someone’s pet project, a market they wanted to be in to dominate Dell, IBM, etc.
However, I would not call it a failed experiment. One of the largest supercomputers (at the time) was an Xserve cluster. Nothing about the experiment failed.
I will tell you that Steve Jobs was not a fan of the Xserve product line. He did not support it, which meant its days were numbered. He stated Apple was a consumer company. Not a business enterprise company. The Xserve teams were soon disbanded not soon afterwards.