If you knew anything about what happened to WebObjects, you would be hoping that such a scenario never occurred.

A summary of that would be great....

I know that Apple pushed WebObjects to the back burner when they acquired NeXT in the mid 90s but I'm not sure why it would be bad for them to buy 280 North today.

> A summary of that would be great....

Heh. Serious power, terrible polish. They blew off all the NeXT veterans when they destroyed it as an objective-c development platform, but didn't finish the job of porting it to Java for five years so you ended up working on this platform that feels like a developed-in-isolation mainframe monster. Dev tools looked nice but made you want to slit your wrists from random crashes and other strangeness. There were a couple of periods where they looked like they would kill it which was stressful for people with codebases on it. All efforts at documentation did a very poor job of selling its incredible patterns and features.

But everyone I know who stuck at it has done well - many ended up at Apple working on very cool projects. I'd love to read a history of whoever wrote it one day - it was so far ahead of its time - I've got a theory that they had some people on it who had done serious research and practical time on some sort of web-like thin-client platform that pre-dated the web. Culture in Apple is different now too.

Unless there's a clear way for something to shift hardware, Apple isn't really interested in it. WebObjects has languished, despite being killer in more than one respect. An update (and de-java-ing) of WO tools with something like Atlas integrated would be absolutely killer, but unless it helps them shift more Macs in big numbers, I don't see it going anywhere.

My punt is that Apple is going to make a big enterprise play in the next 2-3 years. Time is ripe, and it can be done without a big investment in capital.

Wait until Steve Jobs publicly denounces enterprise IT as a business with no future. He'll be right, in more ways than one.

"-enterprise IT as a business with no future. He'll be right, in more ways than one."

Can you clarify? Because that seems very misinformed. Unless you mean on-premise deployments, which has been on the way out for years.

With SaaS + cloud computing, Enterprise IT is just starting to get interesting again.

I can't give this topic the justice it deserves in an HN comment, but yes I'll clarify.

In 10 years time, the "IT Department" virtually won't exist at most small-mid size businesses.

I think a lot of business software is going to be taken off-the-peg, or plug-boarded from open source software as interfaces approach ubiquity and organisations like government, banking and b2b start to expose consistent "APIs". It's already happening now.

We also have gen X and Y moving into senior management and the internet generation actually moving into work. Computer skills are getting to the point of being virtually innate.

Acquiring computer equipment will be analogous in business to buying a photocopier or some other office equipment.

</crystalball>

Seriously? I hear this all the time; do you guys work in IT or in web development? The web people are way over on another page. ERP is primarily the reason IT exists and ERP packages take DECADES to change - witness the MASSIVE amount of COBOL still around (including here). ERP deployments are complex and almost always customized.

I suspect Gen X and Gen Y (which includes me) generally doesn't have a clue at what goes on in a "real" IT center - meaning one that is not (a) some awesome start-up that will be forgotten dust tomorrow or (b) a web oriented consumer-facing business. Nothing in IT is anything like "buying a photocopier" nor will it ever be. The company that takes that approach will be run into the ground by its competitor that innovates.

Apologies in advance if this is rambling.

I'm an IT contractor (never done web for money). My opinion was formulated based on my experience managing an IT division over 5 years or so and also doing various PM and architecture roles.

You can more-or-less validate the first 50% of my claim by giving a bunch of computer literate people some brand new boxed PCs or Macs, and an internet connection and telling them to go for it and set up their environment. They'll be able to get things up and running, and if they have a little bit of nous they will usually come up with something workable.

Of course, it won't be engineered. I did some work for a fairly big manufacturer about 10 years ago that opened a small office on the east coast of Australia. The small office got absolutely no IT support as it was off the radar, and because of the corporate structure Finance left them alone too.

They managed to brew up the essentials of what they needed using Access for sales/marketing, MYOB for the books and corporate webmail and hotmail. When IT found out, they went spare and "fixed" everything. The office suffered in both performance and morale because instead of their terrible (but working) homebuilt CRM and accounting systems they had to use a set of ancient AS/400 apps that were about 1000ms away (no problem for interactivity because they were on 5250 screens, but very slow turnaround). The PCs were useless too, IT made them log in to Netware and do file/print over an 8kbps CIR Frame Relay connection.

Government (and to a lesser extent business) exposing and unifying APIs and SAAS probably means that in 2009 situations like the one I messily chronicled above will scale, because the IT development and infrastructure component just isn't required. Someone somewhere else who knows all about scaling, security, DRP and backup has done it for them and is happy to charge a per-user-per-month fee.

If this happened now, they might have used a 37Signals product and Salesforce for example (no idea about the ERP side).

My current contract is a guerilla finance project to build some analysis tools for SOX compliance that they haven't been able to get corporate IT to deliver on for 3 years. We built a small app in Python with a web front-end (Django). It was quick, it worked, and it's a manifestation of people realising that IT has become commoditised and that IT doesn't have to be hard. I guess IT wanted to do something like build some ABAP programs in SAP using consultants that charge £800 a day on a 2 year timeline.

There's a lot of law firms, design offices and small practices that just go out and buy some macs and never even call in IT help. It's going to happen and keep happening, and it's difficult to see how the shift away from corporate IT could happen if you're focussed on changing the VAT rates in FORTRAN, applying PTFs to the iSeries, or keeping the active directory backed up. Shifts aren't usually obvious when you're in the thick of it.

I don't think the quickest typists in the typing pool ever thought that the managing director would type his own memos 30 years ago, either.

Absolutely agree with you on all points. I've been saying this for a few years too, and you see it happening now with cloud computing replacing IT guys in startups.

I'm actually very happy this is occurring because more than 50% of the time, dealing with the IT guy is like dealing with a bad police officer. It seems like they're always on some kind of misplaced power trip...

Let's hope that Steve Jobs is still going to be around in 2-3 years.

I'm no groupie but I'd hate to see him go.

iWork, iCal server etc. Apple is in the middle of a large enterprise play. It's just not a big marketing push yet, they're likely waiting for the product to mature a bit.

We don't plan on creating a Java version of Cappuccino and killing off the Objective-J API any time soon ;)

I believe some if not all of the guys working at 280 North are ex-Apple engineers.