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Most people who work in enterprises don't work in IT so they don't care about admin tools etc. Most people work in marketing, sales, accounting, finance, logistics or manufacturing and all the software for all those departments runs on Windows. Middle market accounting software for Mac? Does not exist. Manufacturing/inventory control software for Mac? Nope. Contractor estimating/job costing? You get the picture.

ORLY?

Twenty years ago, that was definitely the case. Not anymore. Here are but a few examples:

Productivity/Project Management BTW, this has been around for many years.

Contact Management/Planning/Marketing

Accounting (also has been around for DECADES)

Manufacturing/Inventory Control/ERP (VERY Robust, been around for years. Cross-Platform, Semi-Open Source) I write ERP software for a living, and this is GOOD stuff!!!

Job Costing. XTuple does that, too; but here is but one example: A highly-rated Job Costing/Estimating package that is cross platform. Job Costing software tends to be more "vertical"; so I would have to point you to an agregator site, like this one.

Now, don't think these are the ONLY solutions in each of these categories; because they aren't. They are just ones that were easy to find, and/or that I was familiar with on some level. A bit of poking around will quickly show that there are many other alternatives in most, if not all, of these categories.

Does Windows still have the upper-hand when it comes to business Applications? Without a doubt; but that picture has seriously been changing over the past decade, and as Macs start to encroach more and more in the business world, there will certainly be more attention paid to the platform by business Application Publishers. And in another decade, your post may very well be simply a joke.

Times change; a few decades ago, CP/M was supposed to be the "business" OS but there was no "business software" available. A couple of decades ago, businesses, including Apple itself, ran primarily custom-built business software on AS/400s and the like. Who's to say what the future holds?

And, here we have yet another example why FLOSS falls behind. People want software with specific features but they want it for free.

I was going to say he could probably pay xTuple to add the feature, but it appears somebody else already did.

You may be successful! congrats! you can now hire an accountant, they'll want QuickBooks.

Have you ever really put this theory to the test? I called around my city and was able to compile a decent list of accountants who were familiar with and openly supported PostBooks. PostBooks is cross platform and is released under an OSI approved license.

Of course finding that kind of thing out would require a good 20 minutes of a busy professional's precious time so I'm sure you'd be much better off just going ahead and buying Quickbooks without a second thought based on advice from a web forum rather than actual interactions with real accountants.

Could you point me to those registry changes? I've been fighting with Sickbooks to get limited users (read: users, not super users or admins) to run Quickbooks. I used the settings that Intuit specified, but no go. Then I created a domain group "quickbooks users" and gave them full ownership of all the folders and registry keys that they should need. No joy. Now all "quickbooks users" are super users on their local machine.

Still won't allow them to do the update that it bugs the users about ever couple of weeks when they decide to push a new release that doesn't fix anything you need and breaks more stuff you do need. The installer fails citing that the user isn't an admin (why not check this before you nag them?). It doesn't check the permissions, it just fails when it does the GID check.

Quickbooks is the only software I've ever seen that makes you trash your box just to get it to mostly run. Bonus points for it insisting on installing an old version of Flash. I've been dealing with this stuff since the 2005 or 2003 version. It's maddening and I want to switch to XTuple Postbooks ( xtuple.com). It's open source and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux ( source forge page). Unfortunately, no one is going to want to make that switch since they know Quickbooks.

Quickbooks is the one thing that keeps Windows on my machine, and is the only reason I ever boot into it.

I tried hard to beat WINE into running it, but alas no luck - at least the version I run.

I looked at what's out there in Linux accounting software, and either it was really obscure, apparently abandoned, or aimed at mega-corps, not small and home businesses. Plus none of it offered an easy way to handle Canadian tax frameworks.

How about PostBooks? Runs on Macs and Linux (and even Windows). And since xTuple is based in Canada, I'm pretty sure they understand Canadian Tax Laws. And if you outgrow it, you can move up to the full-blown (non-free) xTuple ERP system.

As a QuickBooks user, who prefers it to MYOB at least, I ask this question in all honesty:

What else is out there for small businesses that's better than QuickBooks and isn't a cloud-based service?

Sure! How about PostBooks?

Simple, Open Source. FREE. Works on Macs, Linux, and oh, yeah, those Windows things.

I believe it even will read QuickBooks files, and will scale to the full-blown (not free) xTuple ERP system!

So how much accounting, sales order processing, customer relations management, HR, payroll,stock control and other business related software is available on a Mac? Or Linux?

Glad you asked!

My personal favorite in the ERP world is xTuple (formerly Open Mfg). They even have a free QuickBooks-Like version. Speaking as an ERP software dev. myself, this package is strong enough that I have seriously considered becoming a VAR for it.

Then, there are the longstanding AccountEdge/MYOB, and AppGen/Custom Suite (AppGen Custom Suite is pretty cool, IMHO). I also see FlexWare Accounting, which has a Manufacturing add-on. Don't know much about FlexWare; but it looks pretty complete.

Then there are the interesting database/app-generation systems, such as Omnis (which had the whole idea of "web apps" NAILED more than a decade ago), and, last but certainly not least, 4D, also sporting a wonderful web-app solution. Both are big database-oriented Application-Creation packages that have marched along for years, never quite getting traction, but never quite falling over, either! In fact, 4D's web server was eventually spun-off into its own product (name escapes me, sorry!), and has the enviable reputation of not only being faster that snot, but also has never been hacked... Both Omnis and 4D embraced the concept of being able to "publish" applications directly on the web, such that the apps retained all, or nearly all, of the look-and-feel of the "desktop" versions. Quite cool, actually.

And the hidden advantage is that pretty much all, if not all, of the Mac business software is actually cross-platform; so you get platform-independence "for free". What's not to like about that?!?

As far as CAD/CAE tools go, there are several choices. My personal favorite is VectorWorks, which whips all-over AutoCAD (but maybe not so much on Inventor). I have a longstanding Mac consulting client, who has to live in a world of architects who use AutoCAD, and he has zero problems using VectorWorks with their files, import or export. The only "problem" is that VectorWorks actually supports many things that AutoCAD does not; so he has to be somewhat careful not to use features that AutoCAD (by all rights, should, but) does not support. In fact, when AutoCAD became available (again) for Macs, he wasn't the slightest bit interested in switching away from VectorWorks. And although not widely known in this country, the extremely high-end CAD/CAM/CAE system Siemens PLM NX/UG (Unigraphics) has been available on OS X since at least 2009, and is also available on Linux.

And let's not forget Qt. It's a royal pain to develop in; but you can certainly churn out some pretty complex cross-platform apps in the environment. Eagle PCB is a good example of how advanced a Qt-based app can get... As a (now former, I guess) embedded developer, I used to lament the lack of good (or really, ANY) development tools for Macs. But even that has been (slowly) changing. Microchip now supports both Macs and Linux with MPLab X (helped along considerably by the acquisition of Hi-Tech, and their cross-platform C Compilers). And BTW, Microchip even addresses the question of "Why not just

So how much accounting, sales order processing, customer relations management, HR, payroll,stock control and other business related software is available on a Mac? Or Linux?

Glad you asked!

My personal favorite in the ERP world is xTuple (formerly Open Mfg). They even have a free QuickBooks-Like version. Speaking as an ERP software dev. myself, this package is strong enough that I have seriously considered becoming a VAR for it.

Then, there are the longstanding AccountEdge/MYOB, and AppGen/Custom Suite (AppGen Custom Suite is pretty cool, IMHO). I also see FlexWare Accounting, which has a Manufacturing add-on. Don't know much about FlexWare; but it looks pretty complete.

Then there are the interesting database/app-generation systems, such as Omnis (which had the whole idea of "web apps" NAILED more than a decade ago), and, last but certainly not least, 4D, also sporting a wonderful web-app solution. Both are big database-oriented Application-Creation packages that have marched along for years, never quite getting traction, but never quite falling over, either! In fact, 4D's web server was eventually spun-off into its own product (name escapes me, sorry!), and has the enviable reputation of not only being faster that snot, but also has never been hacked... Both Omnis and 4D embraced the concept of being able to "publish" applications directly on the web, such that the apps retained all, or nearly all, of the look-and-feel of the "desktop" versions. Quite cool, actually.

And the hidden advantage is that pretty much all, if not all, of the Mac business software is actually cross-platform; so you get platform-independence "for free". What's not to like about that?!?

As far as CAD/CAE tools go, there are several choices. My personal favorite is VectorWorks, which whips all-over AutoCAD (but maybe not so much on Inventor). I have a longstanding Mac consulting client, who has to live in a world of architects who use AutoCAD, and he has zero problems using VectorWorks with their files, import or export. The only "problem" is that VectorWorks actually supports many things that AutoCAD does not; so he has to be somewhat careful not to use features that AutoCAD (by all rights, should, but) does not support. In fact, when AutoCAD became available (again) for Macs, he wasn't the slightest bit interested in switching away from VectorWorks. And although not widely known in this country, the extremely high-end CAD/CAM/CAE system Siemens PLM NX/UG (Unigraphics) has been available on OS X since at least 2009, and is also available on Linux.

And let's not forget Qt. It's a royal pain to develop in; but you can certainly churn out some pretty complex cross-platform apps in the environment. Eagle PCB is a good example of how advanced a Qt-based app can get... As a (now former, I guess) embedded developer, I used to lament the lack of good (or really, ANY) development tools for Macs. But even that has been (slowly) changing. Microchip now supports both Macs and Linux with MPLab X (helped along considerably by the acquisition of Hi-Tech, and their cross-platform C Compilers). And BTW, Microchip even addresses the question of "Why not just

I saw these people at a Linux Expo earlier this year.

http://www.xtuple.com/

Most of the packages are open source. They provide customization services and some specialized tools, as well as support (sort of the original Cygnus business model).