Their 40 year old boss the will be younger than many of the 20 something, 30 something, 40 something entrepreneurs who already, now, at this moment (me included) would find the idea of moving to Active Directory and stocking the company with Wintel laptops equally farcical.
> A startup may be all-Mac. Eventually if it's successful though, it'll be too big to use 'consumer' tools only... likewise they have no realistic counterpart for Active Directory, nor business email or collaboration (at least Google has that though).
Between the two, they have those needs pretty much completely covered (also, Apple does have increasingly good support for MDM now). To me this reads more as a complaint that neither of them is trying to execute the same bundling/business model as Microsoft, or selling the same kind of security model as what makes sense for an old school IT shop that literally could never leave Microsoft products if it even wanted to.
Every single mobile device in "Enterprise" is using MDM provided and supported by those two companies for business users at multiple layers of the stack required to provide that functionality, they just don't make a business out of selling it directly as a Serious Enterprise Product to IT departments (the least important part of the stack, ie where a guy in a collared shirt with a web app takes a middle manager out for a steak dinner).
I set up MDM for the first time while standing in line for a flight at the airport, on my iphone and for my iphone. My company uses an enterprise IdP with a zero trust security model, which I saw executed firsthand by both Microsoft and Google for their own companies, neither of which made a fuss about giving me a mac device to work with. Somehow, it worked.