You know, for the most part, we like to think of ourselves as pretty shrewd students of human behavior, but we admit that there are still certain segments of the population whose actions and motivations confound us. In particular, we sort of wish that Jane Goodall had spent a few years studying Enterprise People in their native habitat, because frankly, those guys baffle us. Mind you, we're not talking about Spock, Bones, and the guy in the red shirt who snuffs it within fifteen seconds of beaming down to the planet's surface; we mean "enterprise" in the context of big business IT and the like. The few Enterprise People with whom we've come in contact have exhibited behavior so alien to our own that we find ourselves desperate for an Animal Planet hour-long special to explain just what the heck they're thinking. (Like, what was with those haircuts?)

Lucky for us, then, that Apple has devoted resources to the study of this fascinating species, even if it is just in hopes of siphoning a bunch of cash from those juicy enterprise IT budgets. While the company hasn't generally shared its findings with the scientific community yet, it has dropped a few helpful nuggets of info to the public on occasion. For instance, Macworld UK reports that Apple UK's managing director Mark Rogers recently described the company's Xserve RAID product as "the iPod for the enterprise market," and that single simple statement actually reveals quite a lot about these creatures whose ways are so different from our own.

For one thing, Enterprise People apparently have really big pockets.

Seriously, think about it; the Xserve RAID measures 5.25 inches by 17 inches by 18.4 inches, so anyone who's going to lug around something that's almost a full cubic foot in volume just so he can listen to music all day clearly must have an appropriate wardrobe capable of accommodating its bulk. Moreover, given that the Xserve RAID weighs "60-100 pounds depending on configuration," Enterprise People possess either superhuman strength and exceptional physical endurance, or little enough mental acuity to grasp that stuffing a big honkin' RAID server down their pants is perhaps not the best way to carry their music around with them-- unless, of course, Enterprise People also have really extensive music collections and require high-speed access to any of 875,000 songs at any given moment.

Also, given the Xserve RAID's need to draw 300 watts of power while in use, we can infer that either Enterprise People are stuffing another enormous pocket with a fully-charged, heavy-duty uninterruptible power supply, or they never venture out of range of a single wall socket. (Or they're using a Really Long Extension Cord™.) Indeed, the more we think about Xserve RAIDs being used as portable music players by Enterprise People, the less suitable they seem for the task. For instance, there's no audio jack, so we haven't a clue what these people think they're actually listening to in the first place.

We suppose it must all come down to cost savings; while they would be far more portable and functional as portable music devices, the 88 iPods necessary to store as much music as a top-of-the-line Xserve RAID would cost four times as much money-- unless, of course, you factor in the additional costs that accompany the Xserve RAID choice, such as hernia operations, hospital stays, and the like. Hmmm, let's see, now... reduced functionality and higher long-term costs in exchange for a smaller up-front expenditure; sounds a little like the practice of outfitting large companies with fleets of cheap Wintels and then eating a fortune in support costs and downtime in the future. Fascinating. Whoever said that Enterprise People weren't at least consistent?