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Recommend Apple, Lose Your Job?
rocketjam writes "While examining whether outsourcing tech work to India is really cost-effective, Robert X. Cringely takes a look at the old conspiracy theory that IT doesn't recommend Apple solutions because they need less support, thus endangering IT professionals' job security." Cringely argues: "Ideally, the IT department ought to recommend the best computer for the job, but more often than not, they recommend the best computer for the IT department's job."
Used to work as a contractor for a major pizza company that used to be in Kansas. They were an entire Macintosh place, had systems for about 700 - 1000 users I think it was.
Then a large soda company bought them and felt that 'they all needed to be the same' even though the Microsoft Offices the platforms ran worked together.
So, we went from the two of us supporting 700 - 1000 users to 18 people.
And the user populace was not happy. The standard rebuild time of a machine went from 'when they got new ones' to once a week. We had device driver issues, and SLAs of getting machines back up and running in two hours so we ended up just ghosting machines over and over to clear up whatever went wrong.
Weird.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
End tutorial. Should all be familiar from there.
Sort of facetious, but, well, not really. Try it. Take a half hour out of your time. If it's not that easy, well, then you now know you're making the right decisions instead of wondering "if".
Ten years ago, nothing beat appletalk from a user's prespective. Finding printers was easy and straight forward, as was finding servers. It was easy to share your work with others. And at the time, there was (and still really is no) equivilent in the Windows or Unix worlds.
/. users (preceived costs, lack of apps, unfamilarity, high cost of experiment, vendor lock, ...).
I've heard administrators horror stories of dealing with apple talk, but they don't seem to much worse than other horror stories. And even if they were the cause of a little more pain, isn't that the price of providing a good network solution to the users.
At my former company, when it was time to move away from appletalk, the network adminstrators jumped as fast as they could to replace it. But they didn't have horror stories of having to patch thousands of users computers, or bringing down entire networks as reasons for their JOY of seeing appletalk go away. Instead, it was that appletalk "slowed down the network".
So, we got a new network where we had to remember the IP address of any printer we wanted to use and any server we needed to access, and to share our work we had to tell everyone our IP address and hope that they wrote it down or you'd be telling them again, and again, and again... We went from a user centric network to a faster IT centric network.
Although I am a big Mac fan, I don't agree with Cringley on this issue. There are other reasons that Macs are being used in most businesses besides IT looking out for their own jobs. And most seem to be outlined here by
But whenever I think about the lose of AppleTalk, and now see it being blamed for Apple's shortcomings, I really wonder who IT thinks they work for. Always thought the user, but maybe not...
I am living proof of the Peter Principle
You might, from the fact that I quoted a line that said exactly that, conclude that I know that. I'm adding factors to the original TCO equation, not denying the factors that have already been mentioned.
Let's put a box together. The $799 eMac has an 800 MHz processor, 128 MB RAM, 40 GB hard disk, 32 MB video card, ethernet, firewire, modem, etc. A $599 Dell Dimension 2400 has a 2.2 GHz processor, 128 MB RAM, 80 GB hard disk, on-board video, and apparently no ethernet or firewire ports. The most important point here is that whether these two are equivalent computers depends on what you use it for. It should be clear that for a certain range of purposes, we can assume the two are equivalent.
Further assume that the eMac will be used for 3 years, and the Dell for 2 years. Finally, assume that the eMac will resell for $400, while the Dell will resell for $200. Doing the math, the Dell costs 55 cents a day over its life with you, while the eMac costs 37 cents. Therefore, the TCO of the eMac is actually less.
Now, note all the assumptions I made. The truth of the conclusion is dependent on the truth of the assumptions. Check the numbers out for yourself, because I just made up the usage years and resale value for this example.
C'mon. Is /. run on a single 1 GHz PC?
I don't think so.
So Apple has a "benchmarking" page:
http://www.apple.com/xserve/performance.html
Which shows Apache Web Serving performance -- where it's faster than a Dell 1650 (not sure if it's running IIS or Apache). Point is, even allowing for a little marketing hyperbole, OS X + Xserve is a fully capable web server.
Assuming of course you think Apache is up to the job?
To all those who insist on putting the price of a PC up against the price of a "comparable" Mac...
Let's get something out of the way right up front: a Mac is a Mac and a PC is a PC. Sure, that's obvious, but it surprises me how little it's acknowledged in these kinds of discussions. $1500 worth of PC hardware won't give you a Mac no matter what you put on it. The same goes the other way; Mac hardware and software will never get you a PC no matter what combination you use. In the end, a PC is still a PC and a Mac is still a Mac. Play with numbers all you want, it won't change a thing. Folks who want a Mac will not be happy with anything but a Mac, not even a comparably spec'd out PC, period. The reverse is just as true.
Comparing Apple computers to PCs is like comparing Palm devices to ring-binder planner systems (nothing should be implied by the order in which those items were listed, by the way). Both serve similar purposes, and there are folks who use each who would never think of ditching their choice for the other. So would it be safe to say that all Palm users should ditch their Palm devices for ring-binder planners purely on the basis of a price tag? I think not. Palm users love their expensive Palm devices and binder planner users love their slightly less expensive binders, and neither is going to be wrong for sticking to their preferences.
I find the whole Mac vs. PC debate silly for the reasons described above. I use both, although I prefer my Macs to my PCs. That's just me. My wife loves her PCs and despises my Macs. Life goes on.
Well, since you seem to be gunning for a response from a Linux/x86 person for some reason, I'll bite.
Your argument is well taken, and in fact I think it is an excellent point to use when debating Windows vs. Mac as a desktop machine. Apple has a beautiful UI, can run MS Word for those who need it, and is built atop BSD so I would expect it to be very stable. The extra purchase price of a suitable Mac with OSX for daily desktop use and as a network client in an office setting is more than offset by the smaller number of tech support people required to maintain it, resulting in a net savings vs. Windows. I wish Apple would make OSX available on x86 so it can run on the legacy x86 hardware that most places already have. Apple's currently exhibiting their biggest market miscalculation since they priced themselves out of the personal computer market in the '80s, by not releasing an x86 version! Heck, Longhorn and DRM and Trusted Computing and Subscription-Pricing and all that is an open invitation for someone to come in and eat MS's cake. If the option existed on existing hardware, I'd recommend migration to it as a standard desktop ASAP. I might well be running it at home right now instead of Linux; I'd at least give it a try for sure.
Where I think your argument breaks down a bit is in the server room. OSX is beautiful, and all that, but there is no reason to be running a GUI on the server. When it's loaded up with connections and is busy being a server, then you start opening windows with those flashy effects, it's going to bog the whole network down once the CPUs peak out. Your phone will start ringing off the hook with users helpfully telling you that their spreadsheets are taking forever to load. Unix GUIs have historically been so clunky and ugly to save clock cycles for more useful things, like serving up files and SQL data records to clients. When GUIs were used at all. This is part of why *NIX is eating MS for lunch in the server space (leaving security aside).
Being a BSD beneath it all, I'd expect there's a way to boot OSX into a command line and not use the GUI. If you do that, I'd expect it to be similar to running BSD on any other machine. As a server, OSX should require no more and no less of a knowledgeable maintenance staff than any other BSD implementation. Once you're underneath the GUI what's it matter whether it's Apple's BSD or OpenBSD or any other flavor BSD?
Now, given Apple is a sole-source outfit, if their stuff is well integration-tested prior to release, it might save a little bit of time, but that cuts both ways - I'm currently stuck with a used Beige G3 that I picked up (after consulting apple.com) last weekend intending to give OSX a spin, and now they've decided it's not going to be supported after all. The moral is, any savings in support staff must be weighed against the risk of getting locked into a marketing-driven, sole-source vendor for both hardware and software. So far, OSX looks very promising, but the very nature of Apple's business model presents the risk of Microsoft-style lock-in and a similar forced-upgrade treadmill without the benefit of commodity hardware pricing. Remember to take that into account. Given how much babysitting a Windows box requires, it might still pay off to switch though!
Additionally, Apple has very little of a track-record with enterprise servers. It wasn't until a few years ago that they managed to properly implement multitasking and multithreading, and to do it, they basically admitted to themselves they weren't ever going to figure it out so they copped the BSD kernel instead. I commend them for the decision, but it still leaves a seed of doubt as to their ability to follow through at the enterprise level. I've seen Apple change direction, suddenly drop product lines, and almost go bankrupt more times than I can count; you'll have to forgive me if I adopt a wait-and-see attitude for a while before I recommend bet