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Enterprise CTO Switches to Mac OS X
louismg writes "BlueArc CTO Geoff Barrall, using a PC day in and day out, found things becoming progressively more difficult as they increased in complexity. After one final straw, he sought out an alternative, and switched to Mac OS X -- in a corporate environment. His column, titled 'Rethink Before You Reinstall' documents the challenges facing Mac OS X in enterprise, and how he has changed his views." We've not had a switcher/MS-bashing/Apple rules/etc. article in a little while, so here you are.
Either that, or he really enjoys using Outlook under Classic... which, if he has to use any calendars from an Exchange server, would be his only option. At least, until summer, when there will supposedly be a new version of Entourage with Exchange integration (I'm not holding my breath. I'm betting fall, at the earliest.)
Prepare to be burninated!
Your missing the point that it is a different product. They don't even really resemble each other. I recently switched to the Mac platform and to my surprise and dismay Office v.X is an excellent product. If they can ever get OpenOffice a Quartz GUI I'll switch. Till then it's Office v.X.
The Mac Business Unit at MS is like a complete different company too, not the status quo.
I think it much more likely that he meant he's reinstalled Windows in all its variations many times over the past years.
.plist files (created in xml) instead of registry entries and the .plist files are in the bundle. What is also in the bundle is the executable code and the application strings for as many languages as you like.
There is a difference between running a complex program on Mac OS X and on Windows. Windows throws DLL files in various places along with registry entries. Apple has bundles which are double click to open the app inside directories. Apple bundles use
Most apps can just be dragged around between disks and continue to function just fine because all their components are moved with a single icon drag and their location stays the same relative to the base location of the bundle directory.
All in all, it's an elegant solution and eliminates a lot of DLL hell.
Pray tell, what Windows OS offers the equivalent to Mac OS X bundles?
I'd also second that overall the article wasn't that informative. It also is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It is true that many switchers switch because of problems with Windows that isn't really Window's fault. (i.e. comparing Window98 with OSX and ignoring XP) By the same measure you can find on many forums people who have a bad Mac experience which isn't typical of the platform. No problem except when they then judge the whole platform in terms of one bad behaving application, bad memory, or a bad motherboard. It often seems most comparisons are emotional ones based upon one bad experience. Fair comparisons are all too rare.
I should also add that, even as a OSX lover, there are crossplatform problems. I find the browser in OSX for browsing Windows shares rather weak. It misses many servers. Yes many of those problems are Microsoft's fault and not Apple's or Samba's. But they are there. Work arounds are needed. (And yes I know that some of those problems even appear in mixed Windows networks) Many programs, such as Illustrator, often have problem saving to Windows shares for reasons no one is quite sure of. Further compatibility between file formats isn't 100%. Exporting presentations from Keynote to Powerpoint doesn't always work, for instance, and often screws up PDFs and the like.
It is much better now than it was in the past. However there is also a lot more work to do. Hopefully better Outlook compatibility is coming (either from Microsoft or Apple). Most people expect Apple to come out with an Office killer this year as well. We'll see.
So does this.
Windows DLL Hell is caused by STUPID installers that overwrite system DLLS with older (or broken) versions.
As of Windows 2000, installers can not overwrite system DLLS. Windows File Protection will replace them with the original version.
Now, DLL hell is not over. But it's a hell of a lot better than Windows 98.
"Most apps can just be dragged around between disks and continue to function just fine because all their components are moved with a single icon drag and their location stays the same relative to the base location of the bundle directory."
Yes, that's a nice feature. Windows apps can do this too, if the're written properly. Office, for example, can be moved, as can most other applications. Instead of dragging the executable bundle, however, you drag the program directory.
With NTFS, in fact, any shortcuts will update themselves.
There are also applications for Windows that are entirely self contained (installers, for example). Most, however, are not.
I'm sorry but this is not quite true. Your commentary struck me as odd, so I decided to test it myself (as I am tied to a Win 200 machine). I moved the "Microsoft Office" folder from the "C:\Program Files\" folder to another one in drive C. This is what happens every time I launch the programs directly from the "Microsoft Office\Office" folder:
Excel: "An error occurred and this feature is not functioning properly. Would you like to repair this feature now?". If I say yes, it asks me for the Office installers. As I don't have the installers at hand, I am forced to cancel the "installation", after several error dialogs. Afterwards, (or if I say I don't want to "repair this feature"), things appear to work correctly (I haven't checked everything, though).
PowerPoint: It launches without a problem, but the first time I use a menu command the installer dialog appears. I am also unable to open templates.
Word: The dialog appears when launching, as with Excel.
Access, Outlook: I don't use them so I don't really care.
The shortcuts in the Start menu, the launch bar, and the desktop invoke the installer dialog and don't launch the application if the dialog is cancelled.
We can argue that the programs anyway appear to be operative after dismissing all the dialogs, and that everything will probably be corrected by running the installer from the CD. But this is a far cry from what MacOS X (apparently) offers: they can (apparently) simply move their directory to a CD-R or a FireWire disk (or an iPod) and the first time the programs are run they heal themselves automatically.
There is even a story of a kid pirating MS Office from a display Mac in a store by copying it to his iPod. Some tech reporter saw him, I think.
PS: I returned the directory to its location and (thank God) everything returned to normal.
> Windows DLL Hell is caused by STUPID installers that
> overwrite system DLLS with older (or broken) versions.
No no no. You're making excuses for Microsoft again. If you go and look at how this works on Mac OS X you will understand that you look foolish defending Microsoft on this. It is night and day how it is done right on the Mac and it is completely fucked on Windows. You can't excuse it in 2003.
Listen, all you have to do to break a Windows app is move or rename it. That is outrageous to a Mac user. It's like if I told you not to move a picture file to another disk or it won't be viewable. I rename apps that have ridiculous names, like "Adobe® Photoshop® 7.0" I change to "Photoshop" and it works just fine. There are exceptions to the Panacea I'm describing, but the vast majority of the time, if an application is somewhere that the system can discover it (local storage, network storage, anything the user can access) then it will run. That's it. End of story 99% of the time.
It's not that Mac applications heal themselves if moved. It's that they are self-contained inside one icon.
Imagine if every time you saved a text document it had to be in Documents/Text Documents/ and if you moved it out of there the system wouldn't open it. That's what MS Windows applications looks like to Mac users. A Mac application is as self-contained as you would expect a JPEG image to be, so it doesn't break when it's moved.
Breaking when moved is sort of a de facto copy-restriction method on MS Windows, so no wonder they haven't fixed it yet. Less control for the user, more for Microsoft.
There's actually a really useful side effect here.
When Adaptec(now Roxio) made Toast 5 Titanium, they(even in the OS9 version) made it use a separate thread(yes, OS9 is multithreaded). Once it's installed, the program itself is a single file. If you copy that file two or three times, you have several identical, individual, working copies of Toast on the same machine, each one capable of burning to one burner at a time. With the joys and wonders of FireWire, you can daisy-chain multiple burners on a single Mac and have them all burning at the same time.
In Windows, there are no common or simple ways to do that with Easy CD Creator 5. If you try to make a copy of ECDC5 in the same directory as the original, it will run as one process, no matter how many times you launch it. If you try to make a copy of ECDC5 in a new directory, it won't run. If you try to install a second time from the disc, it will install over the current installation. And it won't burn multiple discs on multiple burners by itself.
Welcome to Macintosh.