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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".
I like how he is careful not to mention specific products or brands when he is making negative remarks, but with positive comments, he clearly indicates the application or OS. Does anyone have the balls to stand up to Microsoft?
http://www.naildrivin5.com/davec
_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...
No, you miss the point!
There is a person who uses a computer to make presentations to customers so that his business can make money.
I've certainly never seen anything like this on Slashdot before!
The consequences are potentially enormous. It might be that this person doesn't even know Perl!
It's nice to see Apple winning the "top down" revolution. I can only hope, as a sysadmin, that Apple's OS X will continue to make inroads into the corporate sector. It is easy to administer, robust, stable--and best of all, works as advertised.
I don't know how many times I've been burned by Windows products that just don't work right. I don't know how many times I've had to deal with stupid Windows problems and kludge together a solution. I'm tired of wasting my time with the same non-issues over and over again. I know I'm not the only one.
Apple's mistake back in the 90's was to try winning a "bottom up" revolution. Giving their computers to school districts, in theory was a great idea; it produced people who were used to using Apple computers would go buy Apple, or use it at work. Apple made a simple product that worked well, but was stigmatized as a "toy."
It wasn't Microsoft, but rather IBM won that battle by using a "top down" revolution. Appealing to the execs/technophiles in an organization. Making the PC seem more "professional," or technically advanced. Microsoft has been riding on that IBM wave ever since. But they've shot themselves in the foot more times than I can count.
It's nice to see the tables turned: Microsoft's "Jolly Rancher" OS keeps trying to "dumb-down" bad engineering with more annoying wizards, more annoying popups, and more annoying "security" features that just make working with it impossible.
While Microsoft attempts to win a "bottom up" revolution with candy-colors and glitz, Apple has made a real, rock solid OS that can be used by anyone. While Microsoft alienates more and more corporate customers, Apple is selling comparably priced corporate systems to their PC counterparts.
More proof that Microsoft's greatest nemisis is Microsoft.
Notes From Under *nix: blas.phemo.us
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.
[...]nothing that would lead anybody to think I'm using anything other than a regular PC. No blue screens [...]
:)
Isn't that a contradiction?
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
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?
XP is better than what came before, but just last week I had to spend an hour troubleshooting and finally reinstalling Outlook XP on my girlfriend's brand-new Vaio. After 6 weeks of working fine Outlook just refused to open, no matter how many times you "repaired" it. No software/hardware changes to the setup, just 6 weeks of turn it on in the AM, check email all day, and turn it off at night. If this is enough to break Outlook in a little over a month, then someone at Microsoft (still) isn't doing their job.
For a point of comparison, my PowerBook G4 has been running OS X 10.1->10.2.4 since July '01 (across several network environments), and I haven't had to reinstall anything. Just 2 data points, but ones I find telling.
Office v.X uses a different codebase and is developed by a different team than Office for Windows. They share a common file format, basic interface aspects, and featureset, but they are very different beasts.
For example, installation of Office X means dragging its application folder from the install CD to your hard drive. The first time you launch an office app, it installs the few support files it needs. If any of these support files get broken or lost, they will be automatically reinstalled the next time an office app is run.
You do need to run an installer to install "extras" like Equation Editor, Clip Art, and extra Office Assistants (ooh! ooh! hurt me more!), but for most users installation is literally drag-and-drop.
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
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.
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.