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Understanding Changes in the Macintosh Market
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When I can buy two PC's for the cost of one Mac, I still gotta go with the PC solution for a business workstation. The support cost for our organization is negligible since we don't change our hardware or software very often (we won't upgrade past Win2K until it becomes absolutely necessary).
Right now, Linux is an attractive alternative to Windows, but the tools we need to conduct our daily business simply do not exist on the Linux platform and we cannot depend on the Open Source community to provide them.
While I own a Mac, I cannot recommend purchasing one for the office unless one has capital to spare.----
Laugh while you can, monkey boy.
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"In theory this shift in the cost mix should have an obvious consequence: the emergence of significant competitive advantage for systems, like Linux or BSD on x86 and Darwin on the PowerPC, where the OS is not explicitly charged for.
But has this happened? Do you see people re-thinking their positions?"
Once a company or organization reaches a certain point of money in the bank and computer experience, it doesn't. The comparision is not one of 'this system is cheaper than that system', but 'this system costs less than the one we bought before it'. Comparision shopping goes out the window.
Secondly,and most importantly, most IT managers are very short sighted. A friend of mine's brother does tech support in a PC only shop. I get the impression is fairly large, though I'm uncertain as to how large. Anyhow, he comes into town to visit family every now and then. On one occassion, he was in town for like 2 weeks and we got to talking. You see I work in a mixed enviroment (University research). OS 9,OS X,Linux,IRIX,Ultrix, and Windows. My research group more specificially doesn't have IRIX or Windows. Anyhow, we got to talking. I was telling him that the only machines that need tech support staff are our Windows PC's (in the Institute) and all the Unix machines just work (comparativly speaking of course, I've seen about 4 crashes and 2 mysterious "deaths" in 4 years of working with about 12 Unix boxes). He didn't beleive me. The very idea that one doesn't need a tech guy for every 20 or so computers was absurd to him. He was jaded from working with PC's in the "real world" (as if running 2-3 day jobs on 1GHz+ machines wasn't "real world").
Not only that, but most businesses are already making a profit with the cost structure they have. They see no reason to "risk" a different cost structure....
" Logically you'd expect that people who succeed in reversing the Wintel dominance in the server room by using Linux to gain control and stability while extending hardware lifetimes would be emboldened by this success to look at the Mac desktop as, in effect, offering more of the same benefits.
But do they? Are you seeing this or anything like it? "
This really depends on what kind of "server room" you are in. From what I have seen Windows doesn't have a "dominance" in the server room. Never has.
But to answer your question, Cheap Unix's are changing attitudes. Not Linux specifically. The assorted BSDs, which in many cases are stronger than Linux. From what I have seen the change is not in the MS camp, but users of other Unixs.
"Are PC people becoming more willing to think about non Microsoft alternatives as Microsoft licensing costs increase and they are exposed to an increasing barrage of information about open source software and such Unix variants and Linux and Darwin?"
Compared to the price of other server software, MS's stuff isn't that "expensive". It's not specifically an MS thing.
"The font management, graphics tools, and Unix kernel that underlie MacOS X should, in theory, have effects like improving people's ability to retain information presented on screen and, equally importantly, on their ability to navigate easily through menus or other on-screen control environments. "
They piss themselves and demand that YOU do the support for it.
GS d- s+: a- C+ U++ P L- E---- W+ N++ o++ K w--- O- M+ V-- PS PE Y+ PGP- t+ 5++++ X++ R tv b+ DI++ D+ G e++ h* r++ z+ --http://www.ebb.org/ungeek/
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday July 24, @01:43AM (#797)
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"Almost no geek thinks the Mac sucks anymore, and that's a major change."
Almost no geeks think the Mac OS sucks. Those geeks you speak of still think that Macintosh hardware is overpriced and underpowered, not to mention the closed nature of the hardware. If these people could throw together their own PPC box and run OS X on it, they would be.
They want OS X, not Macs.
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One key item that I have observed over time is the lost productivity that occurs when people are using the wrong tool for the job, or suffering through crashes. How many times have you seen some poor user extending Lotus 1-2-3 or MS Excel way beyond what it was designed to do, when he or she should be looking into using a low-end database, like Filemaker or (*shudder*) Access?
Unfortunately, this loss of productivity is not reflected in the incentives of most IT departments, which are run as cost centers. Their incentives are almost always based around reducing direct costs, not maximizing profits, which must also take into account the revenues generated by corporate activities. Although the TCO of a Mac may be lower than a Windows PC, this may be offset by economies of scale with respect to the Windows installed base and risk aversion by the IT department. A marginal difference of a few hundred dollars per machine split over a four to five year life span may be insufficient to sway the IT department.
However, the user of said machine may well see a different story. Let's examine two cases: an attorney in a large law firm who needs reliability but not a lot of specialized software, and a technical stock market analyst for a mutual fund who needs the best, specialized tools for the job.
The attorney has a billing rate of $250 an hour, not unreasonable for a senior associate or junior partner at a large law firm in a major city. If her computer crashes and she loses an hour's work, she has just flushed $250 down the drain. If this occurs just once per week over 52 weeks of a year -- and those of you familiar with Windows (even XP) will agree that this is not an unlikely occurrance -- that's roughly $13,000 in lost revenues per year! Even a 50% reduction in crashes will pay for a heckuva lot of equipment.
What does this look like, from the IT department's side? They observe no cost at all beyond some grumbling from the user who is not savvy enough (attorneys are notoriously clueless when it comes to computers) to know better. The IT department has no incentive to change, despite it being a clear benefit to the company.
Let's look at this from another angle: once per year, the Windows OS installation on the PC gets totally hosed, requiring a re-format and re-install of Windows. (My personal experience with Win2k is that this happens more like once every 3-6 months.) When this happens, the attorney is dead in the water for a day or two (8 to 16 billable hours or $2,000-$4,000 lost) while a support person re-installs Windows. It is likely that in a large enough organization the IT staff has a pool of replacement machines that are ready to go in case of a desktop machine dying, but even so this takes about 4 hours for the support person to pull one of the spares out of storage and set it up ($1,000 lost).
What costs does the IT department observe from this? The support person's salary is something like $35 an hour fully loaded (benefits, office space, etc.) so the maximum cost that the IT department observes is $560 for 16 hours of work, when the true cost to the firm as a whole is more like $4,560. The analysis of this case is straightforward: the IT department is observing a maximum of $560 per year in computer support costs for one attorney. The firm as a whole is suffering from $17,560 in computer support costs for one attorney. Compared to the firm as a whole, the IT department has little incentive to change.
The other case that I'd like to examine -- the stock market analyst -- is more subtle but at the same time more general. Analyzing the attorney's case is easy -- she bills by the hour and lost time translates directly into lost money. The stock analyst provides value to the mutual fund by figuring out what stocks the fund should be investing in for its shareholders.
He may suffer through crashes and system re-installations without it having a direct cost to the fund's revenues, but these will reduce the quantity of his work. He will locate fewer good stock picks over the course of a year. Worse, a constained set of tools forced on him will reduce both the quantity and quality of his analyses. This will have an even greater impact on his ability to locate good stocks for the mutual fund to buy.
As he struggles with the crashes and an inadequate set of tools due to a platform choice imposed on him, he will find fewer good stock picks over the course of a year. This leads to poorer performance overall for the fund and reduces the number of investors who buy into the fund.
Again, is any of the lost revenue observed by the IT department? Nope. They have no incentive beyond the analyst's nagging to change their ways. This sort of situation is true of almost everyone in a company who does not directly generate revenue -- in most companies the vast majority of the employees. The lost revenue is much harder to measure, but it is often a much larger number than directly measurable opportunity costs. Poor decisions by the IT department in response to incorrect incentive structures can lead to enormous indirect lost revenues.
It is instructive to note that when the pressures of support vs. productivity are internalized (such as at home, or in a small business, or in education) the choices that people make are often very different from those that an IT department makes. This is indicative of the difference in the incentive structures involved, and any economist will tell you that the decision where the costs and benefits are internalized is a more accurate decision.
What can be done about this? Upper management needs to re-think the role of IT within an organization. All too often, it is a poor stepchild reporting to the CFO -- the bean counter mentality prevails and the focus is solely on reducing direct costs, at all costs. Instead, take the first-line support people out of the IT department and make them part of the department that they support. Lost revenues and opportunities from bad IT choices suddenly loom larger in their eyes and those of the managers of the line departments.
Then, give each department a separate IT support budget, and make the remaining central IT department dependent on selling services internally for its budget. This gives the first line support personnel and their managers the power to go outside the central IT department for support. The competition will keep the central organization honest and focussed on providing value to the users, even if only a small fraction of the total IT budget is spent outside the firm.
Lastly, I'd like to raise an unrelated issue: the myth that standardization on Windows reduces costs. If a firm was able to acquire all of their computers at the same time from the same vendor, then you might be able to make a case that there would be only one (or a small set of) platforms that the IT staff needs to learn about. This is almost never the case. Companies purchase computers over an extended period of time. Each revision of the operating system on new hardware has subtle and not-so-subtle differences that cannot be papered over. It is common to see Win95, Win98, Win98SE, WinME, WinNT Workstation 3.5, WinNT Server 3.5, WinNT 4.0 Workstation SP4/5/6/6a, WinNT 4.0 Server SP4/5/6/6a, Win2k, and WinXP running on machines from six or eight vendors all within the same company at the same time. Each of these OS's has a different way of doing things -- there's no standardization here! And certainly no cost savings in "standardizing on Windows" -- which Windows are they talking about?
I compare this to the situation during the Cold War with NATO facing the Soviets in Europe. Doomsayers in the West were always harping on the statement that, "The East bloc armies are all equipped with the same Soviet equipment, simplifying their supply problems! NATO has American tanks, British tanks, German tanks, and French tanks, each of which is totally different! The West is doomed!" In fact, the Soviet supply situation was just as nightmarish -- the Warsaw Pact armies had the T-80, T-72, T-64, and T-62 tanks in common use. Each of these tanks was mechanically completely different from the others. Some of these tanks shared the same main gun ammunition, but then again so did the American and German tanks. Any supposed logistical benefits from having Soviet-designed equipment were illusory.
--Paul
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday October 15, @01:15AM (#18135)
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I know what you mean. I myself voiced contemplation over buying a new PowerBook strictly for my own personal use. When I consulted my colleagues, they imediately went into a lecture about why I should stay as far away as possible from Apple products. The fact that I had a Mac at home and that I'd have to replace all that software made no difference.
One interesting argument was that one of my coworkers had a friend who used the the PowerBook G4 and had nothing but problems with it. When I asked him what the problems were, his only response was "buy one for yourself and find out". The other argument was more reasonable: Macs are more expensive. The thing is, there seems to be a much smaller gap between Apple laptops and PC laptops with comparable features.
In the end, the argument was basically, "it's not worth it, go for a PC, it's more cost-effective". I'm still undecided about what I'll get, but to be honest, for the sake of all the software I've accumulated (much of the important packages already carbon-ized), it seems much more convenient to get a PowerBook.
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Yeah, but the discussion will be visible to everyone and the information will be useful. He could have not mentioned the book and still started the discussion.
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This was my first reaction to it as well. However, I stand by my decision to put it up because I think it is an interesting topic and was personally curious to see what our readers thought on the subject.
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Frankly, from my "in the trenches" viewpoint as a corporate designer, I don't see any change from the continued rapid marginalization of the Mac, at least in the corporate workplace.
Hardware cost going in really isn't the issue in this area, except in comaprison between different models of Windows PCs. Macs simply don't enter the conversation. It's the simple fact of Windows being the de-facto platform in the workplace. This, and the fact that most IT managers maintain a simple "Microsoft Only" worldview. When Macs are allowed into a workplace, they are almost uniformly placed in the "creative" departments...and even then often just among the visual artists. I have friends working in such environments where the Macs aren't even allowed onto the Win networks. They are segregated onto their own dedicated networks. In my case, I don't even have IT support.
I hate to say this, but I really don't see a bright future for the Mac in the corporate workplace. In the home, perhaps, but not in the office.
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Windows may be a bad choice, but it's a bad choice for which you're unlikely to be held personally responsible. For that reason, IT managers view buying Windows-based PCs as the safe bet. Even though the TCO is higher in the long run, no one ever has to stick their neck out and defend a decision to go with the "default" platform, even when that decision proves to be a bad one.
On the other hand, promoting the use of "alternative" platforms such as the Mac and/or Linux can put your job at risk. You'll go on record as the manager who "rocked the boat" by suggesting the organization "risk" using a "nonstandard" platform. Because of that, if problems occur, you'll be much more likely to be held personally accountable for them.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday June 26, @03:13PM (#34713)
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I'm not optimistic. Since 1996 I've worked in HelpDesk, Techsupport and Systems Support in three different "Corporate" environments.
For the most part IT managers and IT departments scorn the Mac. I used to defend Apple and the Mac, but found out very quickly that if you say Macs are hands down, the better OS, or that Windows Does everything Ok and nothing "well", you quickly lose respect and people stop paying attention to your opinions, not just about Mac vs Win, but on all topics.
In order to keep respect, I've found the best I can (generally) do is "Macs are better for Home use... but PCs are better for Corporate Environments". Anything more and my collegues and, more importantly, my managers think I have no idea what I'm talking about.
I've also found that because of this "Windows is King" attitude and the fact that Mac support people are hard to come by (at least in Vancouver Canada), no manager I've ever met will even consider a Mac.
Even worse is Tech Colleges. I'm an MCSE and in my training courses, our instructors knew nothing of what Mac's could and could not do. I had to correct them on several occasions because they would say things like "No. Macs can't do DHCP". They wouldn't say "I don't know", or "I'm not sure, I'll check"... if someone asked about how Mac's handled something and they didn't know, they just said "nope, Mac's can't do that". Suffice it to say, they didn't know a lot about Macs, and therefor, people in these courses come out of them thinking Macs aren't good for anything. I won't say WHERE I did my MCSE but it is a large reputable, well known institution who's name carries wieght on a resume...
...and they are teaching upcoming Support Staff and SysAdmins nothing about the Mac in their courses and outright misinforming them.
Some of the specific situations at companies I worked at
One company had two Mac's in the publishing department and no support people who knew Macs at all. I was there as a summer CoOp, and boy were the Mac people glad to have me for four months!
The second was a major bank in Canada with over 6000 employees nationally and 160+ Branches. I worked in the National DataCentre and they had exactly ONE Mac. Its was to test the internet banking systems. Again, I was the only person there who knew how to USE it, let alone set it up!
Then there was a major shipping company. When I joined them they had no Macs. By the time I left, they had hired a new Graphics Designer who insisted on a Mac but the IT Manager absolutely refused, and she got a Dell.
The road into business IT is going to be a looong hard one for Apple
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday June 26, @03:21PM (#34714)
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Feel free to eMail me at snazzy@mac.com
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday June 26, @03:24PM (#34715)
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I forgot to put contact info in there.
Feel free to eMail at: snazzy@mac.com
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday June 26, @03:50PM (#34719)
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At work I'm was the first to use a PB, my boss and my collegue (wintel power-users) followed shortly after. Reasons: the coolness of the PB G4 and OS X, the unix underpinnings, office X. They would have never done it with OS 9.
yesterday I've ordered an Xserve. Reasons: rackmountable, cool looks, excellent monitoring tools, OS X (unix), excellent hardware and price.
4 months ago we bought two Sun netra's, we wouldn't do that anymore now. Solaris sucks, we are buying an Xserve. At the moment the Xserve is not going to replace our bigger Sun servers like an E250 or E450. Mostly because of habit.
Our experience with open source freeware: mostly very good quality and proffesional software. Often lacks a GUI The absence of the announing quotation and ordering routine makes it very tempting to us. We don't have to spend a lot of time in ordering and paying the stuff and you don't have to worry about the budget.
I'm working in a very small, young and autonomous department with a nice budget.
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I did some telephone support for a local ISP out here..
Since I was the only guy who touched a Mac and knew something about it.. I ended up getting the Mac calls that were a bit technical. Before I got there, they were saying to their Mac customers : "We don't have much Mac customers so we don't offer support, we can try but if it don't work, you're on your own". That was sad, because they had no idea how much Macs were in the city (I still find more and more of them.. and it could account for 3-4% of their direct customers)
Keep in mind that we have a IBM fab near, and the Mac losts it's gound since.
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In my trench work, I would have to say that the problem (like most) lies in the human psyche, specifically of the influence-peddling PC partisans.
Most people who have to work with computers don't really care if it is a PC, Mac, dumb terminal or UNIX machine. If they can get what they need done, fine! Many times, they get used to a myriad of workarounds to make whichever machine they have to use, work in their situation. This happens regardless of how inefficient or ill suited a particular machine is for a particular task.
Why do they do this? It's just easier to grumble about the "stupid machine" and move on, than to find a better solution.
Now, where the Windows dominance in IT comes into play, there are usually other factors. Especially the actions of the aforementioned partisans.
Microsoft may publicly fight software piracy, but they have been the most successful beneficiary of this act. Many of the pro-PC people that I've worked with are that way because they want to install the software that their employer bought, on their own home computers. Because of the PC's ubiquity, most home PC's run Windows. As such, when a business software/hardware purchase is considered, these people only want Windows. Wether it is best suited or not.
In one place I worked, I watched as they ripped out many Macs that were less than a year old, to replace them with Dell crap. It didn't matter that they had a custom sales application that worked extremely well and was written for the Mac. They hired the consultant who wrote it to port it to Windows. They did, but it took two years to finally regain the base functionality, and it had to be rewritten three times because of changes to the Windows version of MS-Office which it linked with, and a switch from Win98 to WinNT.
This decission to change was percipitated not by any rational study on TCO, but on the arrival of a new Site Manager who had a Windows PC at home, and a resentment for the former Site Manager who brought the Macs in. The IT staff also contributed, as the newest youngest member came in with a MSCE.
Also, I've seen commercial UNIX's just about completely wiped out of the various engineering departments I've worked in. In this case, TCO is considered, but usually it is the initial sticker and the fact that Microsoft doesn't use upfront maintenance contracts that hurt UNIX.
Two years ago, when I had to buy a server for a MCAD/CAM/CAE package, it was a no-brainer for me to choose a UNIX system because of the demands for uptime, security, and reliability. I didn't exclude Windows from the outset, including both Compaq and Dell (the company's preferred vendors) in the quotation process.
To my surprise, the Windows based servers eliminated themselves by cost! The initial cost between equally configured Dell and Compaq servers were almost identical to the SGI and HP UNIX servers that were quoted. On top of that, we would need to buy more Client Access Licenses for NT than what were quoted, as well as a second less expensive backup server, as NT domains require a BDC in addition to a PDC as regular reboots are required.
To be fair, we would have been restricted to running NT 4 on this server, because the software that we wanted to run was not certified on Windows 2000 (which just appeared on the scene mid-bid process). This actually helped us out, as Microsoft came clean in the Windows 2000 launch admitting that their internal testing showed that NT 4 Server only had an average uptime of 4.5 days in their own testing.
Our final decission was based on functionality. We bought an SGI IRIX server that has run flawlessly since the day that it was installed. We used Samba for NT connectivity because all of our clients were NT, and the fact that Samba could be tuned for file locking to better secure the data writes than NT could.
I've moved on from that company, but last night was called on by the IT staff to do some consulting and "fixing" of some problems that they were having. The IT staffer told me that the IRIX/Samba combo on the server was the best NT serving solution that they had in the plant, and I confirmed it by witnessing that it had been running for over a year without restart or any problems. Unfortunately for them, the problem was between the NT PDC and BDC which had gotten out-of-sync when an intern changed the password on one.
This brings me to the final piece of the psyche problem; he misconception that any idiot can manage an IT system if the facility is Windows based.
To be honest, the real problem that I was being called about was more about fixing attitudes than fixing the network. After I left this company, another engineer was hired to do the same thing as I did. This individual did not have an IT background, and is adamant that all of their servers that support legacy applications (OpenVMS) or file sharing (UNIX) should be replaced with Windows servers, regardless of the consequential loss of functionality. Why did he want this? Familiarity, partisanship, and fear of learning to use anything that may not have a GUI. Any idiot can administer with a GUI right?
-- Len
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday June 26, @04:16PM (#34724)
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Who would win in a fight between CmdrTaco and AcaBen?
CowboyNeal!
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The biggest change I've seen is increasing respect in the hobbyist/geek market. It used to be that owning a Mac was a guilty pleasure; with MacOS X, it's something you can be proud of.
On Slashdot, I've read dozens of posts (including my own) about people who have switched from Linux to the Mac thanks to its unique combination of Unix power and mainstream software.
I've also read a similar number of posts complaining that Macs are not acceptable because their operating system is not open source.
But either viewpoint is a big improvement from the old "Macs suck" arguments. Almost no geek thinks the Mac sucks anymore, and that's a major change.
The CEO of my company bought an iMac for his daughter, and she loves it. Unfortunately that hasn't brought Macs into the office, primarily because we use some proprietary Windows-only software. But it shows that some people have more open minds than one might expect.
D
amazing.com has amazing things
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As an up-and-comer in the Networking field currently going through school (also in Vancouver). I find the lack of knowledge of the Mac platform at my school a bit unsettling. We do have one Mac. It's for testing as a client to WIN2K. However, not all is lost. I have a good instructor and there is an interest in Linux by a lot of the students as a consequence Mac OS X comes into the conversation whenever we're talking Unix-based OS's.
My instructor is great though for several reasons:
1) His knowledge of all platforms
2) His objectivity when it comes to OS's
3) The fact that he practices what he preaches and has an iBook running Mac OS 10.1 at home.
On the downside there are several students who have a MS centric view. In the end though, They'll only be familiar with MS and I'll be able to deal with things like OS interoperability.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday June 26, @05:00PM (#34733)
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Where are you going to school?
snazzy@mac.com
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I'm the hardware / SysAdmin guy for a small IT company (15 people but growing), and I've had rather good results with replacing our windows machines with iMacs. I achieved this by bringing my own machine in (a G3/350) as my personal workstation. After realizing I had none of the flaky problems the windows machines had, and rarely had to do any maintenance, my boss was rather easily convinced to try Macs. I started slowly, with one sales manager getting an iMac alongside his pc. Pretty soon, he only used the Mac. That was enough to get me the green light to gradually replace the rest of the pcs. Also, an attack of klez that shut down all our machines except the two Macs was rather demonstrative of the advantages. Unfortunately, MS Access won't run on these, so our sales/admin database is being rewritten in Filemaker. Which needed to be done anyways, since Access has never ceased to crash incessantly.
All in all, start slowly, get people over to your side one at a time. It's the productivity which will win them over. My sales people have less downtime from me fixing their machines, and I have more time to work on income-generating projects, not reinstalling Win98 or some such. Once our company grows (we plan on 35 more salespeople in the next half year) I would have had my hands full just fixing Windows machines if that was our platform of choice, leaving me zero time to do development. Perhaps your Boss will listen to such an argument.
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I recognise from your website, you wrote a mainframe vs linux thingy.... thanks for your kind comments on Solaris in that article.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Thursday June 27, @05:02AM (#34759)
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On the corporate world people just don't want to look at Macs, nor hear anything about it.
They know that on the standard platform (Windows) they can have every program running. Everything is available for Windows so why look elsewhere?
This attitude is not Mac-centric. These guys don't want to hear about Linux either BUT as they are being told that Linux is so superior than Windows in server environment they are being forced to put a Linux box somewhere to do some obscure tasks (mainly web serving I would guess).
Linux performance comes at a cost: knowledge. Many small and medium firms don't want to pay for that, preferring higher costs, lesser performance and the illusion that they've made the right choice.
After all, isn't Microsoft the biggest firm on earth? (--> they must build really good systems!)
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Thursday June 27, @07:33AM (#34765)
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It doesn't matter if Xfree86 is available. Unix power users won't use it on the desktop just because of crippled mouse and focus.
PowerBooks are OK for real nomadic work, just because none of the currently available SPARC laptops are so cool. Installing Linux makes some sense then, but it still feels like a shame.
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Plus, if the attorney's firm used more reliable computing systems there would be less of a requirement for IT support & this could lead to redundancies in the IT department.
Would you introduce a system into your company that made your job role redundant? (Even if it was better for the future of the company (& those others still employed there))
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Years before my employment in the school I work at, they used Macs. Four years before I came they switched to IBMs. Two years ago they bought a ton of IBMs for the compuer lab. Now those computers are outdated, the new software will not work correctly, and the lab for the interenet was always down. Recently the decision was made to buy MACS for the lab, and they did. The lab is always working, even the older software (orginal edu-mac stuff) with newer Mac stuff works great.
My experience is that while the switch from MAC to PC may have been justified, in light of Apple's business before Jobs returned. The IBM system nickled and dime them the whole time they used them. Professional network administrators had to come in to fix the lab, a private contract. Now with 30 Imacs and a few new Emac, and airport stations, I (untrained, the school psychologist) run the network. It is that easy.
What is priceless is the children enjoy the computers, they work, and cost us nothing to maintain them.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Thursday June 27, @10:19AM (#34777)
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I currently work in a small Air Force office and even though I am Mac-based the rest of the office is all PC-based as well as the rest of the base. I find it so funny to watch all the problems that they have all the time with their PC's as well as the entire MS-based network. Why, I asked.
It seems that there is a Government-MS Partnership that requires all Government organizations to use and support only MS systems. Not matter what the cost or aggravation. This is just totally insane, there really is not reason for this except that the Government has bought into the MS hype.
As a Mac user and a tax payer this makes me angry on so many levels. First, by being Mac-based a user, IMHO, can work more effectively because they spend less time fighting the system and more time being productive. Second, the money waste, as all things Government, is huge and is extremely wasteful on support, MS licenses, hardware replacement, etc.
A recent example that I found so insane that I wanted to scream out-loud. I gave 2 demos on the advantage of using Apples Final Cut Pro vs replacing old PC-based Avid's but in the end the user had no option but to spend more money on the PC system because the network people would not certify a Mac-based system to be on the base network. When I asked why a network geek actually said, "because everyone knows that Mac's don't network or at least don't do it well. Also, beside video editing what can you do with a Mac?".....This just set me off so I spent an hour explaining that Mac's from day one where designed to network and that it was MS that made it difficult not Apple and that was because MS wants users to believe, just as he does, that Mac's don't network. I then do what I do often in this situation, what I call the 'Stupid MS user trick'. I opened my Powerbook Ti and asked him to name ten things that he'd like to see me do. He named them - I showed him - he said, "Wow- so why does the Air Force keep saying that Mac's are no good ?"
Maybe it's the US Government-MS Partnership ?
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However, an excellent time to promote platforms such as Mac and Novell is when the Jr. tech applies the latest critical update to the Windows server a few hours too late, and the whole network comes under massive hacker and virii attacks, and all the machines with Windows blow up and spread shrapnel all over the office.
While I'm a CNE and CCNA and a whole bunch of other certified crap, I'm not a professional network guy (and probably never will be, unfortunately). However, given what you said, and what I just said, I would argue for the Mac and/or Novell platforms first on the basis of security (which works well if the network has already been compromised), then, at least for the Mac, on terms of TCO.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Thursday June 27, @01:50PM (#34817)
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Consider the graph shown here. (Note that I've intentionally left off the actual values and drawn this without regard to detail to illustrate the key point.) Basic operating system software on a 1981 IBM PC added about
1% to the purchase price; now it often adds 25% or more.