Drat*
I'd done some work on OS Serrver, in fact we purchased a Mac Mini Server, only to find during testing that with the next OS update this installed feature was wiped by Apple and needed to be re-purchased (there was a means to get this re-instated for free but that only applied in the US, so we did have concerns even then about whether or not we could rely on this, at least from a customer relations point of view.....)
For a small business, wanting to host mail on premises (1) and perhaps manage a couple of iThings, have a little intranet and not have lots of boxes heating up a cupboard (IIRC power consumption is about 11 watts when not doing terribly much) these were ideal and whilst I know there is an Apple Tax and also that their attitude to customers is not great, it was at least something where you had "one stop shopping" if something went wrong rather than vendors of different software and hardware all blaming each other.
I think it was a greatly missed opportunity for all those little shops, businesses and the self employed not really in need of any "heavy" IT and lament the passing of the last (AFIAK) of this type of product. If there is something along the lines of some integrated free- or cheap-ware that would do the job on an old computer and is reliable and easy for non techies to set up (so I can also recommend it to friends), I'd be grateful for details. I'd have paid more than the £20 or so for OS server so there's a market, but whether or not it is viable for a developer is another matter.....
(1) On the basis that you can at least pretend to have a bit more control of data you are responsble for and also as one day a major cloud service might fail, taking tens or hundreds of thousands of small business' IT systems down with it. 2E2 was a warning....
*Other expletives may be applied after the watershed.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
