[exelius]

Apple is a different beast... try not to think of them as a technology company. The Apple that was a technology company died 18 years ago and was reborn as a consumer products brand that is backed up by a hell of an engineering org. But marketing/branding makes all the decisions and sets the direction; engineering just helps move the needle of what's possible.

EMC is generally just fucked because their potential customer base is shrinking. While I don't think everyone everywhere will move everything to the cloud, enough migration is heading in that direction that storage appliances seem like a risky business (especially considering the big cloud providers just roll their own rather than buy from EMC).

Don't get me wrong -- I fight the same battles with big companies about how their stupid new $50million data center can't hope to compete with AWS on cost, reliability, security or functionality. AWS runs datacenters at the billion dollar scale. CIOs/CTOs have the mindset of "it'll be better if we control it" -- but then don't realize how expensive it is to replicate all the niceness that you get from AWS like management interfaces, workflow control, etc. All those systems have to be grafted on later, and are naturally behind the curve.