Apple's Macworld Looking To Corporate Users

coondoggie writes to mention a Network World article about a focus on corporate users at the upcoming MacWorld Expo. Along with the consumer announcements (iTV, iPod stuff), there will be several elements dedicated to introducing IT pros to Apple hardware. From the article: "The show has really evolved. For a long time it was a consumer-oriented show and those of us who are from the enterprise space - there weren't very many of us - would use it as a place to meet and compare notes ... Now Macintosh in the enterprise is becoming more recognized and there are tracks that are specifically for us enterprise people. We don't have to sneak off anymore."

Comments

Re:It's hopeless

[armada]

Macs are more expensive. A lot more expensive, when you consider you can buy a basic Windows box that is more than sufficient for most business uses for around $500.

The vast majority of "business apps", especially custom stuff, don't run on MacOS.

Macs don't have anything to really compare with Active Directory, and especially GPOs.

So...why would a business run on Macs? Unless they are a pre-press or video-production house, of course.

You gotta love the nay sayers that speak authoritatevly about something they have done zero research on. The more expensive macs are more expensive. You can buy a Mac Mini for $599 and it is a much better quality machine than the equivalent pricepoint pc. There is a Mac version or equivalent of the most important "business apps" and most of the "custom stuff" get's rewriten quite often and normaly relies on core technologies (SQL, PHP etc..) that thrive on the Mac platform. Mac's do have something to compare and completely integrate with Active Directory it is called Open Directory Research = good. Hiperbole = weak. /steps off soapbox

Re:We just need customers

[FellowConspirator]

If the software was well-written, it would be platform independent. There's no excuse in this day an age for anything other than system software and utilities to be platform-dependent. Platform independence was hard years ago, but not today. Not only do you have Mac and Linux (particularly on the server side) gaining market share (and Windows slowly decreasing), but you increasingly have situations outside the US where government mandates preclude the use of Windows for many purposes.

You company is reducing it's potential customer base.

I work for a big biotech company and we definitely give preference to vendors that are platform agnostic. Research users are given a choice of Mac or Windows platform, so we've got 1:4 Windows Mac at the desktop with all computational chemists and biologists have an additional Linux workstation. We no longer purchase applications that require Windows servers. We no longer purchase apps that are of general interest to research unless they support at least Mac and Windows. Linux is preferred for instrumentation control. All compute-intensive, modelling, and simulation software is expected to run on Linux. All web-apps have to work with Firefox on Windows/Mac/Linux.

There's some historical reasons for those positions (UNIX and its variants is more or less the exclusive platform for modern biology and chemistry, for example), but I see similar situations appearing in other fields where Linux and Mac are dominating in academia today.

Re:Think different; Just Say No to Apple

[bill_mcgonigle]

Apple has never got it. Ever. It means Corporate or Enterprise IT

That's true. Fortunately NeXT took over Apple, and NeXT was exclusively Enterprise. So they have the talent to do it. Now that they have the hardware and the software necessary to do it on a large scale, here's hoping they actually pull the trigger.

bah

[Gary W. Longsine]

"It doesn't matter at all because the vast majority of business applications are not available for the mac. Period. "

It's not that simple, and you probably know it. Most business transactions are apparantly still conducted by COBOL applications so I'll see your Windows Server and raise you a mainframe: Windows will never be accepted in the Enterprise market because everybody knows most business apps are COBOL apps on the mainframe.

Most new application development in the Enterprise market seems to be web based and can work fine with Macintosh clients. This nonsense about "most business apps are Windows-only" is based on the erroneous assumption that just because there are lots of tiny little companies pooping out their custom apps (which nobody else uses) in visual basic that the Macintosh can't play in the Enterprise market. That's definitely wrong in both the server and the client desktop/mobile markets. There is a Macintosh in the Enterprise future.

Re:I for one....

[misleb]

I think OS X might also be lacking somewhat on the enterprise management side. Despite using LDAP for OpenDirectory, it is still more like NT domains. For example, Workgroup Manager just displays a flat list of users/groups. It doesn't take advantage of the hierarchal nature of LDAP. And AFAIK you can to fancy things like partitioning your tree or doing that forest/tree thing that ActiveDirectory does (I'm an old Novel NDS/eDirectory guy, I'm not too familiar with the details of ActiveDirectory) You also have less control over users. I'd hate to deploy OpenDirectory in a very large org. OS X is still workgroup/education class, IMO. Hopefully Apple is adding more Enterprisey management features to Leopard.

-matthew