Apple was an incredibly well established company and the initial iPhone was not used in enterprise… it didn’t really start to take off there until iPhone 4 (2010-2011).
Not to mention the comparison is inane to begin with. Using an iPhone for your enterprise and moving your tech infra to a relatively unknown company are not equivalent at all.
This just seems like a twist on hyper-converged infrastructure + open source.
I mean, I love their design. I just don’t think it’s special enough to warrant mass adoption. And I certainly wouldn’t be deploying at scale in an enterprise environment with zero widespread adoption.
Small entities will just use cloud same as always. Large companies have a multitude of unique needs that won’t all be catered for by a single box. The big vendors will clean up on that front as usual.
"Niche" is not a dirty word. Framework is niche, but if they can make their cost structure work (which I have no idea whether or not they can), that's ok. New products don't need to dominate their market in order to be succesful.
(But I do agree that Google Fiber is a bad example / a good example of a new product in an established market not working.)
Framework is niche.
iPhones do have the pedigree.
Google Fiber is barely used.
Most folks do use a supported Linux distribution, they don’t roll their own.