Eh, it kind of depends imo. Apple’s MDM is pretty great, they just don’t offer any real alternatives to AD, Exchange, etc. and integrating Macs into a Windows environment definitely does make some of the “it just works” magic evaporate quickly.
For a small business willing to go all in and do everything the Apple way I can see it being quite attractive though. Managed Apple IDs through Apple Business Manager for use with iCloud, Automated Device Enrolment with zero-touch provisioning straight out of the box and a robust MDM solution like Jamf make for a pretty neat package. It’s just not one that will appeal to every business, especially large ones or ones with a desire or requirement to keep things on-prem and in-house.
Apple definitely has a very long way to go to become any kind of real competition to Microsoft in the enterprise market, but with MS pushing more and more cloud stuff themselves (O365, Azure) I reckon it’s only a matter of time before they start neglecting things like AD and Exchange. And more people using Apple at home means employees and decision makers will start wanting to use that stuff at work too, for better or worse.
I’m not saying Apple will dethrone MS or anything, in fact I don’t think a future with Apple being a significant player in the enterprise market is particularly likely. But I think if MS screws up enough and Apple play their cards right, it’s not impossible.
Man, if Google wasn’t aggressively trying to make the experience of using their site for free as painful as possible, then I’d probably be happy to pay. But as long as their business model is making things as shit as possible for people who don’t pay instead of trying to actually provide some real value for those who do, they can fuck themselves.