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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.
...if he'd switched over his entire company or consultancy. It's not news that you can "fit in" to (and even "stand out" from) a corporate PC IT environment, I did it for years at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture).
Indeed, when I worked at AC -- an actively Mac-hostile environment that in 1998 was forcing its DTP people to give up their Macs -- I found everything worked BETTER for Macs (we could access printers and file servers far more easily and reliably than could PC users). None of this is new or OSX related (there are new buzzwords to be compliant with is all).
What really annoyed me then and continues to annoy me now is that people standardise on the wrong things: platforms instead of protocols. Indeed, often vendors instead of protocols. "You can buy any computer solution you want, as long as it's from Compaq." But, we can't use Macs because "that would lock us in to a single vendor".
_Your_ problem may be that he's using a Microsoft product, but that's not what _his_ problem was.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Powerpoint pure and simple. Linux has absolutely nothing that works with Powerpoint simply and effectively. At least on a Mac he can use a current version of Office, or if he's really adventurous, he could use Keynote.
Also, by being on a Mac he has access to the most stable and feature rich graphics apps on the planet. (yes, I know all the same apps are available for Windows, but they tend to be flakier on that side of the fence.) Linux just doesn't cut the mustard yet when it comes to graphics.
Pooty tweet
As a systems admin who recently switched to Apple, I thought that this story might be worthy of forwarding to my boss. Unfortunately the article doesn't address anything of particular interest.
For technical people, the reasons we use our computers go beyond simply writing Word documents or opening Excel spreadsheets. The average clod in a company though doesn't care what their hardware is, what their operating system is, they just want to know that Office is there.
Therefore an article that simply talks about how Office works on a non-PC platform is nothing worth getting a boner over. If he'd spoken about Keynote, addresses the advantages of an open file format, spoken about how his company had developed software to write customized presentations based on info pulled live from their database or something - hooray. Perhaps he could have mentioned how easy it is to produce PDF versions of pretty much anything - which in this cross-platform era is a good thing since your document will look the same anywhere. I think my point is understood by this stage.
Me thinks that this whole article is a way to get people to his company's website.
Is this guy trying to get Apple to notice him and include him in "CEO Switcher" ads?
If you're going to use a Mac, why use all Microsoft software on it? Heck, I don't even use MS Office on my Windows box!
And what's with the "blue screen" comments? Like most Slashdotters, I don't like Microsoft - but to suggest that Windows has problems with "blue screens" is, like, so 1999.
One other observation: Apple uses the "blue screen" thing as part of their FUD on Windows. But isn't it funny how most of their users are still using Mac OS 9.x, which is far less stable than WinXP?
One thing I really liked about this article was that, possibly for the first time out of the many switcher articles I recall, the writer doesn't confuse his ignorance of a platform's abilities with limitations of that platform's abilities.
I was shocked that he actually bothered to learn how to set up NFS on a mac without spending at least a paragraph or two whining about how long it took him, or that he had to download some 3rd party software if he wanted to configure it with a GUI. Most 'switchers' probably wouldn't have even figured it out before they wrote their article, and instead would have complained "macs can't do NFS", propagating FUD, just because they don't know how.
As for the rest, yes, it isn't really all that radical. For the most part he just uses the same Microsoft apps on a different platform. However if you look at it realistically, that's what alot of businesspeople have to do to get by.
Sure, he could have tried Keynote and/or OpenOffice, perhaps some time in the future he will. Berating him for using basically the same software package he's allways used isn't very realistic.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Actually that's been changing. Prices are dropping frequently across all Apple lines as the economy sags. They even released a single CPU PowerMac again to lower the price a bit. Most users would be happy with an iMac. The desktops are really intended for professionals who can afford it and also want to be able to upgrade it. You can't upgrade the video card or use a SCSI drive in an iMac.
I actually bought a PowerMac G4 Dual 1Ghz MDD a few months ago. Why would I want to spend that much? I had bought a PowerBookG4 550Mhz a few more months before it. I fell in love with the platform and I wanted a highend desktop with DVD burner and dual 17" flat screens. It's been an absolute joy! Worth every damn penny too! Plenty fast enough. In fact, I would say it feels faster than any PC I've used and I've used the top of the line Pentium and even a Dual AMD. Speed to me is not how fast the CPU clock runs or how quick a Window draws it's pixels but how fast I get my work done. Reliability and satisfaction are much more important then if it's a couple seconds faster!