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Can Apple Penetrate the Corporation?
coondoggie sends us a NetworkWorld story on the prospects for Apple gaining market share in the corporation. A number of factors are helping to catch the eye of those responsible for upgrading desktops and servers, the article claims: "Apple's shift to the Intel architecture; the inclusion of infrastructure and interoperability hooks, such as directory services, in the Mac OS X Server; dual-boot capabilities; clustering and storage technology; third-party virtualization software; and comparison shopping, which is being fostered by migration costs and hardware overhauls associated with Microsoft's Vista." On this last point, one network admin is quoted: "The changes in Vista are significant enough that we think we can absorb the change going to Macs just as easily as going to Vista."
Can Apple Penetrate the Corporation?
Why not? They're already penetrating consumers.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Some concrete numbers on admin costs between the two platforms. Whatever reasons you proscribe to the whole Windows vs Macs vs every electronic plague on the planet, I suspect there's some serious cost-benefits to making the switch at the corporate level.
If nothing else I'd love to see a larger market-share for Apple just to cut down on the number of spam-generating zombies out there.
"The changes in Vista are significant enough that we think we can absorb the change going to Macs just as easily as going to Vista."
Or the changes going to Linux.
Does it want to?
the Mac Mini was perfect for enterprise desktops. Small, competively priced, easy on power, and you can just plug in your old monitor, though you may want new mice and keyboards with them. And now with dual-booting and all the other things the article mentions, it seems pretty logical.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Yes I can see how switching to a Mac could absord the cost of Vista and it's hardware requirments but what about the cost of training a whole enterprise of users on MacOSX.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
You can't get enterprise level support. I.e. next day overnight shipping for parts, 24-hour tech high-level support, etc. Getting a damn power supply should be easily done online a la the stuff Dell and HP offer. Speaking of that, it's also damn near impossible to get an online system apart from the basic Apple store.
No xMac. The Mini helps in this regard, but Apple still doesn't offer a basic tower.
Exchange client/server. It's not good enough until it's perfect.
Uncertainty regarding OS X and hardware. The enterprise doesn't like not knowing what Steve Jobs is going to pull out of his hat in six weeks when you need new hardware today.
The first point is probably the most important, and the article doesn't really address how things have changed. Ever since 10.1 people have speculated Apple is finally pushing into the enterprise... maybe this time it will be. I'm skeptical given Apple's past intransigence. And I'm posting from a PowerBook.
...changing their pricing structure. The big push for Linux is the lower TCO. Apple can't tout that. Their hardware is still more expensive than PC hardware and I don't think that the OS itself is that much less expensive than Windows.
While our workstations are still Windows only, I've managed to make to make our office's server environment 100% OS X Server. Ironically, our MS Access database application is now served by a mySQL backend on an XServe.
However, corporations and businesses in general are prone to using a lot of custom-designed software built by Windows-only outfits. Until that changes, Apple will have a hard time penetrating the corporation.
For Microsoft it is an inability to grasp and implement computer security concepts.
For Open Source it is an inability to make hard and reasonable choice in UI design.
For Apple, it is a complete lack of understanding of the corporate computing mindset. Also game development, but that's a whole other subject.
As a developer and inhouse tech I use my MacBook Pro as my dailey machine, as I can run Mac OS X (Native OS), Windows XP, Vista etc, in virtualised environments where I can test each environment before deploying anything. So for the techs the new MacBook Pro laptops are especially in range for migrating to. However, the major hurdle I see in enterprise adopting Mac OS as their main OS and replacing workplace pc's with Macs is that there is no current Mac OS "Terminal Services" style server implementation. So no thin clients, no centralised licensing control etc. I will be the first to admit (as a huge Mac fan) that windows terminal services in enterprise where most users use solely MS Office, and the likes of FileMaker or Oricle etc works a treat. Unfortunately Apple does not have an answer to this yet on the market. Replacing laptops in enterprise with Macs is another thing altogether, as it can connect Windows Terminal Services (Via RDC Application) and be a great reliable work horse on the road. That is just my thoughts
If it was the decision of the network administrator - maybe. If it was only the question of hardware and money, maybe.
But no one from mid or upper management will put his/her corporate future on the line for the Mac. The fact is, that the corporate higher crust is literally in love with Bill and Microsoft, the poster boy of the Wall Street crowd.
Besides, the corporate upper crust always goes for the safer bet. No one was fired for using Microsoft.
I doubt IT is going to suddenly fund the changeover of all your current machines to OSX or Vista without a damn good reason. I can see keeping your existing systems until such a time that they no longer fit your needs and you need to upgrade, then switching to Macs.
Changing from Windows to Mac incurs other costs, such as having to purchase new copies of Office suites. If you were going to do this anyway, then that's OK. Windows Domain servers may be a problem. Theoretically, with Samba, you don't need to change these over, but as long as you're dumping Windows, why not go whole hog?
I'm not going to claim that I'm an expert, but I've seen at least one Mac user say that they keep a virtualized copy of Windows around solely because MS Outlook has features that MS Entourage doesn't.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Honestly the osX product is far better in a corperation than windows but it's the apps that rule.
All the little expensive sales,marketing and billing apps are windows based. These companies that make this vertical market crap cant program for windows properly, porting to osx would be impossible for them
I am ignoring things like outlook and the other staples, Most businesses live for the vertical apps for their industry. Engineering needs Autocad, Marketing needs their apps, CableTv needs their special CableTv apps. etc...
Until you port all that, you cant get the "apple penetration".
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
They are already all over publishing or sound/video production. Will they penetrate companies that run a dozen of visual basic apps and care enough about costs to not want slick glossy finish or a webcam on their computers? Not likely, but Linux with Wine just might. IT might find that they can understand, customize and remotely manage a Linux distro better than the mind boggling complexity of Vista.
I mean, "no, it's really not ready for the enterprise but these three people say they're excited about it"? And the "elegance of the platform"? WTF?
Well, in any case I wouldn't hold my breath... the day Apple comes out with a viable alternative to domain/desktop policy and the tools to deploy it and control out across 15,000 desktops maybe Microsoft will start to worry. In the meantime Apple is certainly better for small companies that are just establishing their infrastructure, not converting large ones.
There's nothing wrong with Apple if you have the apps you need - the problem is the toolset. Most people don't understand the scale at which many companies operate. That's what "enterprise" is - and for better or worse Windows will continue to do well there for a long time.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
The executives who control the decisions are addicted to their Exchange-powered Blackberries (even if it does mean that all their corporate messaging goes through a company in Canada). At two companies that I've worked for, we used to be Linux/Mac based, but then one exec got a Blackberry. Within weeks we'd switched over to Windows XP/Exchange.
Until Apple offers a Mail/Calendaring system that's as functional as Exchange, I don't see Apple being adopted by corporations any time soon. Though perhaps the iPhone offers just enough functionality in a sexy enough package that the executives will be tripping over themselves to get the latest expensive status symbol.
But not the way you'd expect, top down from the IT department. Nope, it's happening from the ground up, as people start buying Macs on their own, bringing them into work (or working from home), and the IT guys are scrambling to integrate them. Then the IT guys start to like the hardware, they buy it for home use, they push it for work use. It creeps in. I've seen this happen at my own employer, as well as with some of my friends' employers.
Especially at small companies. The company I work at was 100% Windows just 2 years ago. Now we are 90% Mac (only holdouts being our servers, and the dev machines that work on the servers). The impetus was security -- get everyone using Macs since they're safer for browsing/email -- but in the end, people just liked them better, and they require less maintenance. I know, because I'm the guy maintaining them.
A friend today (new Mac convert) was groaning about getting help from his office IT guy for his MacBook, on a printing issue, because that IT worker was openly hostile to Macs. Only months ago, that IT worker was laughing when he heard my friend was considering a Mac, don't get it, it's not compatible with our stuff, you won't be able to do what you need to on there, etc. I just received an email, literally 10 minutes ago -- this same IT guy heard about his printing issue today and WANTS to help. Why? Because more of his other customers are moving to Macs, and now that he's had to use them, he actually PREFERS THEM! He's thinking about getting one for himself!
The vista people are looking at is increasingly filled with Macs... the Wow starts now for sure, but perhaps it wasn't what Microsoft was expecting... as in Wow, there are a lot of Macs in this office.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
For less than the price of the mini I can buy a full up business desktop, loaded with vista, 1GB of ram, 80GB of
disk and on top of that I get a keyboard, mouse and 19 inch flat panel display...and this is from a major distributor, warranty on site etc.
Now do not get me wrong even I would not mind having a mac, but I am not paying 4 times market value to do it.
Got Code?
Microsoft pulling MSO ( and native exchange ) support for Apple.
Pretend as much as you want that there are 'alternatives and i dont need it', but MSO *is* the de-facto standard out there. Without it, Apple will continue to be a niche player in the business world for a long time to come ( if not forever, unless things radically change someday ).
But is being a ( rather large ) niche player really all that bad? They still make great products and make gobs of money. Do they *need* to attack Microsoft's stranglehold on the corporate market?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's been a surprisingly trouble free experience, even though the IT department are loath to become involved in an official capacity (though unofficially individuals are interested and have provided invaluable help). All the major applications are supported and with more of the departmental apps being web based and standards based (especially determined by accessibility requirements) looks to become easier over time.
With rumours of moving away from a common environment things could become easier still.
What problems we have encountered have been sorted by brief research on the net and we're currently establishing a business case to transition to Mac Pros in the near future for our business unit.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
"...the prospects for Apple gaining market share in the corporation."
There's only one corporation now? Geez, all t his merger mania's been worse than I thought.
On the other hand, all Apple has to do is convince one CIO, and their in!
jf
I like microcars
I like using OS X on the desktop and all, but I'll be the first to admit that OS X is not ready for the "enterprise." Things one might take for granted on Windows such as ODBC are very poorly implemented on OS X. Other examples where Apple is lagging behind is their supposed "directory services." Yeah, it is LDAP, so technically it is a directory (hierarchial), but for the most part it still acts like an NT domains. That is, it is basically a flat user/group space. Workgroup Manager does not work well with large user sets. It is not at all suited for larger corp environments where you might have a large directory with partitions and such that span WAN links. Although I have not personally used Active Directory much personally (I'm an old Netware/NDS/eDirectory guy), I get the feeling that is much more mature and featureful than OpenDirectory.
Heck, Apple has only just very recently adopted ACLs for filesystem permissions... and they are still pretty clunky to manage. Like you can't just go to a folder on a server and "Get Info" and check permissions inheritance and such. You have to go through Workgroup Manager or figure out how to use long chmod strings.
The list goes on and on. I think Apple is going to remain the "odd man out" in corporate environments. At least until Leopard. We'll see what Apple comes up with then, but Apple still seems to be focused on home/niche professional users. I don't see it becoming a general office platform for some time.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I can see Corporations more inclined to switch than consumers. The added security alone could save a lot. People talk about the learning curve in a migration but there's a minimal learning curve with Mac. The migration from PC is pretty smooth. It's more jarring going from Mac to PC. I can see the added headaches of Vista being a reason to switch. The constant prompts has me considering a Mac shift again. Given the power of the new servers I can see Mac being very attractive to businesses. Also something that is rarely mentioned is low maintainence on Macs. I push a lot of files around and find myself doing regular maintainence like Defragging. Generally it takes a while to settle in a PC. I found with Mac it involved plugging it in and allowing it to update the software. After that once a month it prompts me for updates. Pretty painless. Consumers may feel married to their software and PCs but businesses are interested in efficency. It may be a big reason for Microsoft backing off from Mac support, they see a real threat in the business world.
I can't believe people are celebrating the onslaught of the only software giant with more proprietary vendor lock-in and questionable business practices than Microsoft. And then there's the practical application- it's like people forgot MS Office and Visual Studio existed...
How is this remotely cost effective or practical? This is like recommending that UPS start using Lexus SUV's to deliver packages...
Vista desktops fall right into microsoft-powered corporate networks the same way XP does... it's not the "same thing" to "upgrade" to OSX... you're talking about scrapping ALL hardware rather than simply upgrading or replacing your weakest workstations. Businesses can move up to Vista gradually or sequentially- especially since all the Office and Productivity suite runs on either- switching to Apple or Linux would be NIGHT and DAY.
This post is clearly FUD, feeding off of the wild anti-microsoft hysteria on this site.
A local Community College I take some language courses at has just gotten an Apple Lab in January specifically to teach Apple Courses, the first ones since the early nineties in that place -- so far, the admins tell me that those machines are the least work to initially set up and keep running.
Meanwhile, while they reimage the harddrives at the rest of the terminals every night on the PC, it seems that Internet Explorer is still getting all manner of toolbars installed. And other slowdowns. And these terminals are locked down, can't even do a copy and paste without the system restricting the user against it. This is true whether the computers are public terminals or in classrooms running some type of Novell software where the student has to sign in.
The techs have long considered Linux (the Gaming Degree has Gimp as one of the art apps), but there are various problems. The art department wants to keep it's various Adobe products, and if just one computer in the school runs Windows, for legal reasons, they are better off buying a site license for MS -- so the administrations says. Then they reason that they might as well "get their money's worth" and run Windows everywhere they can.
I really like the Mac and I would love to see it get more traction in the corporate world, but I fail to understand how Boot Camp or Parallels helps with corporate adoption under the banner of "ease of administration."
Both of these solutions require the admin to maintain a 2nd full desktop environment for each user. How does a full Mac desktop environment + a full Windows environment require less administration than one Windows machine? In the case of Boot Camp are we really going to tell users to reboot during the workday to run some application? That does not sound like good use of employee time and requires training on two different desktop environments.
Obviously there are companies that don't require a Windows desktop per user (using in-house apps that can be ported or those companies that are able to deploy their apps via Citrix for example) but I would think that these shops would already be seriously considering Linux with the ability to run on commodity hardware and an OS cost of zero.
Also I wonder how committed Apple is to the enterprise. They appear to me to have become a very consumer-oriented company. How is Apple at enterprise-level tech support? (I'm asking - I don't know.)
the mini is weak and is not that easy to service.
the mac pro cost is too high for most office use.
There needs to be mid-tower that is easy to open up to add ram, and pci-e cards, change out bad parts, and so on.
The i-macs with there build in screen don't work that well as they take up more space then a monitor + desk top on the ground.
Because of the shift to Intel processors, Apple has been suggesting the possibility to our University (~ 12,000 users so on par with a medium-sized corporation) of pitching Apple as a "hardware" solution NOT an operating system. The idea being to put Imacs and Macbooks in the hands of everyone and just have them boot to Windows by default. Throw in a windows style mouse and keyboard and voila, there is no difference except you are running on nicer looking hardware.
Many will say "Apple is more expensive". Totally not true. Based on educational pricing we have been comparing what we can get to get a 20" or 24" iMac with 2GB ram and 3-year APP etc. vs equivalent machines/warranty/features from Gateway and Dell and guess what, Apple is CHEAPER. The same holds true for laptops as well. We can't see any reason why not to move to a dual-boot or Parallels based platform (and no the new EULAs dont affect those of us using Vista enterprise - virtualization is allowed). Why not view a high-end Apple machine as your Vista upgrade path? We are seriously thinking of doing this as a method to not only get new machines that can run Vista well (have been running Vista on my Macbook Pro with full Aero support since last summer!), but also allows us to more easily support a mixed platform environment so whoever needs/wants to run Mac or Windows applications can. This helps us out tremendously with applications such as R-25 and Banner for compatibility issues we've had with our Mac users and lets everyone use Final Cut Pro to do their video editing etc for the departments that need it. I see this is as a win-win situation, so please enlighten me as to the downside i'm not seeing.
Also, we have an Apple-certified service center (as well as Gateway certified) so we do on-site hardware support already so the support isn't an issue in our organization.
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
I can't believe people are celebrating the onslaught of the only software giant with more proprietary vendor lock-in and questionable business practices than Microsoft.
I didn't see anything about SCO in that article.
Vista prompted my CTO to say "We're going to buy macs for tech instead of Vista, and we'll do a linux install setup for the rest."
NetBoot is Apple's centralized application system. Not the same as terminal services, but it neatly solves the administration and licensing issues. (Warning: PDF)
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
Does Mail talk to an Exchange server yet? Does Calander talk to an Exchange server? Does Lepoard even manage to do talk to a DFS share? Can I easily integrate my Mac into an existing Active Directory setup yet?
Has the corporation had three Cosmopolitans?
Did you not see her minge in those pics of her getting out of that taxi or whatever it was? It looked like two dried up, shrivelled peaches hanging down between her legs, a bit like those wierd bits that hang down under old ladies necks. It was deeply unpleasant.
Even an "mini-ITX" box would be great.
1 media drive bay.
1-2 3.5" internal drive bays.
2-4 RAM slots.
1-2 PCI-E slots.
Socketed processor.
This wouldn't need a tower system, you could fit this in the volume of the NeXT slab or the Performa 4xx slabs, or a "lunchbox" the size of a "short stack" of minis.
As long as the PHB has a windos machine at home, and doesn't understand anything else, nothing else will exist in the corporate domain. Doesn't matter if it's Apple, Linux or *BSD.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I'm a former Apple employee, my current job is primarily about supporting Macs, and I do independent Mac-related consulting on the side. And even I think most of the time, for most employees, it's dumb for large companies to shell out $$$ for individual computers. Remote terminals based on something like a Citrix server are so completely the way to go. The vast majority of corporate users do email, web, spreadsheets, and text documents. Most organizations already give users a network home for their documents rather than running backup software on every single desktop computer. It makes no sense to go through the headaches of software management, hardware maintenance, etc on hundreds/thousands of computers when you can do it all with a few servers.
I love it when Apple moves into a new space. But until you can do something like a Citrix session to a Mac OS server, I don't think their stuff has any role as a standard workstation in large businesses.
With regulations on the books in the US like SOX, HIPAA, and others, not having software and hardware that meets certifications can mean jail time and expensive fines for businesses. This has nothing to do with actual security, but who gets the blame in a breach.
On platforms which have FIPS compliance and have other documentation, if there is a security issue, companies can blame the vendor, vendor puts out a patch, and the bad press and liability will go to the vendor. This is why companies pay big bucks for MS licenses. Without these certificates, companies, and their IT staff will face likely prison time because of failure to keep "do diligence" if a breach does occur.
I am not attempting to demean MacOS. However, until Apple gets the proper security tests done and certifications, I won't risk having my company shut down and myself personally facing Federal time because I used something that wasn't qualified and vetted.
Can't get Software Update to get out past our firewall/Webwasher.
And withdrew(pulled out) prematurely. It turns out that Microsoft is a much better lay. They penetrate real deep. ...And until Autocad for the Mac comes around...Well, let's just say that I know some people who would love to switch, but simply can't.
What?
not with Corporations, but with attorneys. They're concerned about Vista's compatibility issues with legacy apps (and believe me, attorneys can hang onto some legacy apps!). I've urged them that they really should consider using Vista as an opportunity to ditch Microsoft. And they are thinking about it. They don't like microsoft. Many of them have been going through repetitions of the same process since the late 1980's. I've told them that they could in fact switch to linux or OS X platforms and then utilize VMware or Parallels to retain backwards compatibility with their old apps.
By way of example, I understand that the Vatican is evaluating the X-Serve group's latest content filtering product, the X-Communicator, as well as the ODBC (Open Deity-Base Converter) standard, used in a supernaturally-high-availability cloistering add-on. Also, to help fulfill the proselytizing requirements of most modern organized religions, a new bulk-email package code-named "Ad-Minister" is currently under development.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Absolutely yes. I'd buy Apple desktops - and cheerfully pay the premium to run Parallels/XP on some of 'em - if Apple made the right hardware product. I would buy seven next week. But right now, they don't make what I need.
The Mac Pro is grossly overpowered for what we need, which makes it much too expensive for us to consider. The Mac Mini's laptop-class hard drive is probably too unreliable (and not user-serviceable enough) for our 5-year desktop replacement cycle. And while the iMac is about right in many ways, I already have LCDs throughout so buying an all-in-one makes no sense for us.
What I'd need to buy Macs for the office is a headless machine that delivers a single Core 2 Duo, a gig of RAM, integrated graphics, and a basic desktop-class SATA drive in a user-serviceable chassis for around $1100.
But Apple does not seem to be interested in the low-end desktop market, so it's back to Dell for me.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
1. Intel Based PCs can dual boot XP and Vista, too
2. Why the hell would you buy a Mac--from a business POV--only to have users spend 1/2 their time in XP, which you're ALREADY RUNNING?
Which is frustrating. If they gave a flip, they'd be able to drive Linux off corporate desktops in a heartbeat. Native OpenGL support, no fiddling about with what the #!(&% to buy, etc. It's the only platform that can natively run office and unix-style development. However, they don't seem willing to invest the 10-20 FTE and the cash for development/porting fees to target the niche markets that used to rely on SGI in its heyday and now struggle with Linux. Easy pickings for several billion in revenue, but what's that, a month of iPods?
The argument about the effort in shifting from XP to Vista also works for moving from Office 2003 to Open Office. The changes to the user interface mean that the retraining for the upgrade from Office makes OO just as credible an alternative as Office 2007.
Seriously - I have approximately 200 corporate desktops and this is a real chance to shift people across and save a large amount of money. Once OO is in, then we will have a look at Mac's or Linux -
It's a 'softly softly' approach.
Apple has no line of hardware (or software) capable enough to support the backend of an all-Apple enterprise setup. Everything coming from Apple has "consumer" or "small business" written all over it... but that's OK!
Working in a large education environment, I'm exposed to both the struggles and triumphs of each platform. The applications drive everything. Any OS X support for an application is done so as an afterthought, and inevitably they perform better on Windows clients, and require less support. Same goes for file, print, e-mail, NAC, etc.
I wouldn't hesitate to recommend OS X over Windows in a heartbeat to the typical home user... but when scaling to larger sizes, they can be more trouble and expense to purchase and support.
I don't understand why do you think why dumb terminals will have a come back. Dumb terminals are considered deprecated since the late 80's and even the graphic terminal emulators, like Citrix are used only for auxiliary tasks like remote maintenance, working on multiple systems while sitting before the same desktop or reaching your office desktop from home. The UI latency induced by terminals is a huge trade-off, there is a considerable ergonomic difference between instant UI response and 2-300 ms. I understand that maintaining a single server is much easier than maintaining hundreds of desktops, but I think that would really decrease the work efficiency of the people using it. Does a server even scale to support several hundred simultaneous graphic terminal clients?
ZOMG!! They've already penetrated CTU!! Anyone else catch those Apple Cinema displays all over the CTU office? Hey, if it's good enough for CTU, it's good enough for the rest of us. Then again, CTU does seem to have a chronic problem with hackers...
repeat this message load and clear everywhere. im dead, this is how sata.nism works: they will pretend to be your friends and family, on the phone, even in person, playing on the superficiality of human relations. they try to provoke deaths (for example by car), that look like accidents. they will try and poison your food at every opportunity, be very afraid. i lived z.iegelst.rasse 3.a, beilefeld, germany, i am 24 years old, i am currentlz being poisoned. http://img249.imageshack.us/img249/6297/renate17gc 2.jpg
The statistic I recall said for Windows, you need one admin for every 30 ~ 40 boxes/users. OS X is more along the lines of one for every +100.
I have been trying to pin this statistic down for years. Last statistic I saw was years ago in PC Week which said 1 admin per 120 boxes. Other stuff is simply anecdotal. Do you have a source for this? Anybody? MUCH appreciated if someone can track this down. Very handy when trying to justify staff.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Just make versions of the Macintosh with Vista or XP pre-installed on them and make OSX optional.
Apple just has to be a better vendor than Dell, Compaq, IBM, HP, Gateway, etc. and other PC makers as well.
Apple needs to advertise more than Intel Macs can run Windows as well as OSX, and offer an option to buy the Intel Macs with Windows on them instead of OSX, or at least a dual-boot configuration with OSX and Windows on the same hard drive with two different partitions.
Apple also needs to adopt Novel Mono for OSX, to allow Visual Studio.Net developers to port their applications to the OSX platform using C# and Visual BASIC just like they do on Windows. Most corporations write their own custom applications in C# or Visual BASIC anyway. Usually they don't use Macintoshes because the Macs cannot run C# or Visual BASIC code or even run Visual Studio. Mono is Visual Studio compatible.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Have you considered usingthe various X tools such as Xterm to allow you to run an application on a remote server as though it was local ?
'Terminal Services' is just a Microsoft hack of an established X/Unix technology and has been available since Adam was a boy.
Have you considered using rdesktop on your Mac ?
Have you done any research at all ?
...that corporate world is not going to wait every year until MacWorld to find out what the product roadmap is.
Apple will have to ditch the culture of secrecy (they can keep it for the consumer stuff) over their roadmaps. Corporate buyers need long lead times and intro and dicontinuance notices. And corporate IT wants plenty of notice on technology directions from all their key vendors (partially so they can warn off the ones that are about to make a mistake) so Apple's attitude about this would HAVE to change.
You blind cretin! Look two posts above, I posted one long ago, you damn idiot. This place makes me sick!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Many larger corporations and governments are loathe to go with sole-source suppliers. If Dell screws up, there are a dozen other suppliers to get computers from. If Apple screws up, then you're screwed. No one other than Apple sells those machines.
Smaller companies and schools may be able to get away with this, but I'd never recommended it for any large company I was working for.
Now, I'd have no problem recommending OS X if it ran properly and was supported on non-Apple hardware...
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Our IBM mainframe at the Fortune 500 company I worked for back in '92 supported over 3000 graphic terminals nationwide, with less than 500ms response time. Mainframes talk to control units, CUs talk to terminals - at the time, about 32 per channel. Good times.
First of all which large corporation changes software this quickly? "Ooo Vista's out we gota upgrade!" Doesn't happen that way. Large corps will takes years before they upgrade to Vista only when the cost is right. By then a lot of the so called compatibility problems with Vista will be long gone or Vista versions of applications would be out.
Where I used to work, large Telco, they finished upgrading everyone to windows XP middle of 2004. That's for an OS that was released in 2001. For Vista expect something similar or for it to take even longer. Most likely they'll do it around 2010-2011. Switching from office 97 (oh yes, that right) to 2003 took till end of 2005. There's not that much improvements to Vista that makes it more desirable for corporations to roll over to it quickly. Only with Microsoft stopping support of an OS or new applications no longer supporting the existing OS would corporations move to a new one.
Now as for when the large corps do go and put XP out to pasture I still don't think they'd switch to the Mac. There are lots of reasons but price is the big reason. I don't think you can really say macs are competitive price wise with PC. People get promotions from saving relatively small amounts of money for the company. Writing up a request to get Macs for more money then PCs just don't make much sense. In addition you still cannot count of application support.
Oh? Apple has this already: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=30
I've used CryptoCard's gear. It works. Well. On a Mac.
If you want to do it manually, use Apple Remote Desktop http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/
ARD 3 has support for something called a "Task Server", which lets you spin off installation or other jobs to a separate machine, which runs them as systems come online.
Look a little deeper in the future.
And anything you can do on an OS X server, you can do on a BSD server.
But BSD is dying! ;)
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
.....when you cant spell 'accurate' or 'discount', it is pretty tough for your potential clients to get that warm, fuzzy, trusting feeling. Ya dig?
I don't pretend to understand all of the issues with major application deployments, but most Mac OS X software is perfectly happy running from a read-only network mounted server directory (or directly off CD-ROM for that matter).
I have never understood the need to separately install application software on every PC. When you want to roll out an application, install the application on a server and let the users double click the application icon. What's the problem ? Why take up disk space on every PC ? Users still have their own settings, preferences, recently used files list, etc.
Couple this approach with user directories stored on servers and automated back-up is a snap too.
Believe it or not, AOL had a huge Macintosh contingent. Among their server developers it was something like 75% using one as their primary machine. Of course, there was a PC (mostly Dells) on the desktop as well. I really missed giving mine up when i left.
markus
Hey, who are you? CCCCEO?
See, in the real world there's no such thing as perfect, it literally can't exist. There is only ever good enough and no two people stand at exactly the same point on the good enough continuum. If you want badly managed client end-points, go ahead. snort... Sorry, but Windows is the epitome... the very apotheosis of badly managed end points, even with all the bells and whistles of AD and SMS it's still ridiculously painful.
Deleted
Which leads me into a story. At one time we had an employee that was surfing some pretty raunchy porn in a cubicle farm. While we had some evidence, we realized that we didnt know for sure who was really doing it. The problem was that we had unlocked the clock on the toolbar. So we didnt know when the violations were really taking place. The timestamp on the files didnt match up with the phone logs, or system logs. No one was logged in as far as they were concerned.
So we secured the clock and heard people throw a fit for a few weeks about our powermongering ways. But the HR department was happy that we could track who was doing what on our machines.
Anyway the crux of the matter is that one you get to the point where you have too many employees to trust the whole lot to behave. You need some lockdown ability that can be centrally adjusted. Just getting the machines "right the first time" never flies because there is always another disaster waiting in the wings. Some peice of software that needs to be installed yesterday, that needs to have some security disabled just a bit. Anyway getting applications to run right on a box thats unsecured is a whole lot easier than having software work where the user is thoroughly locked-down.
So I get why your IT is loathe to support it in an official capacity.
Storm
The GP means to join a Mac to the AD domain, not just authenticate to it. Huge difference.
I, as an admin, would be seeking full and total control over the machine attached to the domain. Mean: the split second you join it to the domain I am the lord master and god of all local access and files on that machine.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
In Soviet Russia, BSD confirms it: Netcraft is dying.
Well, maybe if they buy it dinner and drinks first ...
Bark less. Wag more.
Or until Apple can come up with something competitive with MS Office, whichever comes first. I don't know how it is in other parts of the world, but here in the US, as I'm sure anyone who works in a medium+ sized corporation will agree, companies are absolute slaves to the Office suite. Specifically, Outlook, Excel and Word. Completely beholden. Yes, Office for Mac exists, but it's totally different and rumor has it it's going to be discontinued after 2K8 seeing as VBA support has been canned. I'm not saying it's impossible, but companies have literally billions of dollars in human capital locked up in MS Office. The thought of transitioning any large organization over to a new Office suite is probably sufficient to send its CIO running through the nearest window. Any Mac clone would have to a) have a very similar UI and b) be extremely compatible with existing versions of Office.
Interestingly, I think it's actually Google that might have the best shot at this. A free office suite that requires zero install and can be accessed from anywhere seems to me to be the only shot at gradually chipping away at Microsoft's overarching dominance.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Here are some more stupid question that will appear on Slashdot..
Will speedos be accepted as corporate attire?
Will drinking and driving become legal?
Will NAMBLA gain a respectable place in society?
Will Mac fanbois stop being stupid and no longer post this kind of garbage on Slashdot?
Will Slashdot actually become something worth reading?
I have never figured out why it took Apple so long to integrate a decent shared and managed calendar in OS X (a la Outlook and Exchange)... or at least that is what I am hoping that CalDAV will turn out to be in Leopard. I mean, c'mon, it has been essentially 7 years since OS X was introduced, and we are just now getting a calendar where you can have multiple users share and manage it!?!
I switched my two person office to Macs 6 months ago after getting sick and tired of dealing with daily tech and security issues with WinXP machines. The integration of iPhoto, Pages and Keynote has been great, but to have a calendar that my assistant can't change and has to e-mail me appointments so I can schedule them in myself is ridiculous!
At least from a small business perspective, simple calendar, contact and mail features that are available in a $600 OEM copy of Windows 2003 Small Business Server are way more useful to me than Quicktime Streaming Server, "Collaboration Services" and iChat server!
I call BS!! To what model terminal are you refferring? Mod 5? Are talking about mainframe graphics, or true desktop GUI? Which OS? I work for a mid-sized county, and we upgraded our mainframe a couple of years ago. Admittedly, it's not a high-end mainframe, but the thing started slogging running a *single* X-windows session to a Linux VM running on it.
Nothing interesting to say...MUST...NOT...REPLY...ohtheheckwithit.
I have been working at maintaining OSX Server at the core of my organization for approximately two years now. A bit of background... we started with a Mini, now an XServe and a number of Powerbook/MBP client systems, not to mention the typical majority of Win32 clients, Linux fileservers, OpenBSD firewalls, and so on. Our requirements for laptop systems put us in the upper-levels of all of the brands, including the MBP systems. For an organization that requires little administrative overhead (engineering to overhead ratio) this works well, as users are familiar enough with the platforms to choose and support themselves intelligently. In nearly every analysis, the use and maintenance of Apple's products is on par and occasionally cheaper than the traditional PC options. This includes initial cost of hardware, retention of value and software licensing. They did well there. Now what really frustrates me is how they have failed in the sector..
1. Partial Server Administration applications
These cover approximately 60% of the functionality provided by the software. If you begin to alter the service's configurations manually (as any good admin should) the WGA or SA applications break. As an example, enable dynamic host updates in BIND's ocnfiguration. SA will fail to load the zone files.
2. Server Administration Applications are Apple-only
Not every admin carries around an OSX based laptop. How do you win over IT staff that have Win32 entrenched within their organization? Make it easier than MS's Server offerings. Opening up a VNC session to perform simple tasks is ridiculous when an app that does little more than format and display XML data is available to the MBP wielding admin.
3. VNC
Every copy of OSX is capable of hosting Remote Desktop. IIRC (I have not had the occasion to verify) the authentication and transport protos are more protected than VNC. If you buy Server, you should have the ability to use this to access the system.
4. OpenDirectory
Lack of simple management tools. The command-line tools are available, however the learning curve for maintaining OD is steep without a built-in management console. WGA is a good start, but the common LDAP browsers are better.. except that their interfaces blow chunks.
5. Support for Third-Party Authentication Services and Servers
Work with RSA to build a plug-in. Ship with a pre-configured RADIUS server.
6. User-level access to administration functions
Seriously.. If I have an OD running with 100 users, give them an easy method to change passwords without requiring an AD/Domain structure. SSH is great for the nerds (woot), but if I have to help Marketing install putty one more time..
At any rate, of _course_ you can hunt the net and grab solutions for some of these problems. Some are in the ports distro. If Apple wants to prove itself equal or better, it should provide good, consistent solutions to the most basic IT administration problems.
Must run. I am fashioning a mini airplane to place in the cool wind tunnels on the front of the XServe.
-ebo
Dual-Core Intel Xeon up to 3GHz
Every Mac Pro offers the incredible power of two 64-bit Dual-Core Intel Xeon "Woodcrest" microprocessors. You choose the processor speed -- 2GHz, 2.66GHz, or 3GHz.
300ms? What kind of network are you talking about? Wet string? Anyone on a 100Mbit full duplex switched network will have response times indistinguishable from a local workstation, Citrix or X11. In fact it'll be faster for everything but the most graphically intense applications.
It's easy to get hold of a server which will happily run several hundred clients, with horsepower to spare. Though a single big machine is the expensive way to do it, several smaller much cheaper machines will have better characteristics, going to thousands of clients is just as simple.
Deleted
My company is slowly switching to an all Mac environment. Three years ago, we were considering moving all our clients to Windows and using Linux servers. Fortunately, reason prevailed and we stuck with Macs, despite using a crusty old Irix server serving Appletalk. Last year, through company growth, we had moved to a mainly Mac shop and we are, after major consideration, moving our file and backup servers over to XServe and OSX. (Sadly we still have an utterly insane group of Gentoo servers doing the rest of the serving with included downtime because the person responsible thinks doing untested upgrades on production servers is a good idea)
The biggest problem, as the article says, is not Apple's hardware or software, but the entrenched and encrusted Microsoft/Linux anti-Mac prejudice and the lack of professional support options.
So you already have LCDs for everybody.
Buy $999 iMacs ($1074 with 1Gb) and give everyone dual displays...
or buy $1199 iMacs with the following specs and give everyone dual displays:
17" 1440 x 900 pixels ATI Radeon X1600 graphics 128MB of GDDR3 SDRAM Mini-DVI video out with support for DVI, VGA, S-video, and composite video output. Support for external display with digital resolution up to 1920 x 1200, analog resolution up to 2048 x 1536
2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
1GB memory
160GB hard drive1
8x DL SuperDrive (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
That is prety close to what you are asking for.
5. Ship with a pre-configured RADIUS server.
IIRC, Leopard Server will offer RADIUS. I can't wait, because then I can centrally manage access to the AirPort Base Stations at a few clients.
6. If I have an OD running with 100 users, give them an easy method to change passwords without requiring an AD/Domain structure.
Huh? What's so hard about doing "Change password..." from 'System Preferences' -> 'Accounts'? That works without being an admin-level user, I just tested it on my setup at home with an OD account.
Thanks! That does look like a useful product. I'll read up on it and add it to my catalog of useful software.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Apple's business practices make it difficult for a large corporation to widely adopt Apple computers. Notice how, to get maximum hype, Apple reveales nothing about their future plans. Then one magic day every few months Steve Jobs get's up on the podium and says "The new giga-flux apple server is now being manufactured and will be available in two months!" Crowd goes ga-ga. The computer, while great, has relativly limited configuration options. Because it has to work.
Large corporations need to plan out their PC purchases over time spans measured in years. What kind of commputers will Apple sell next year? Ask Steve, but he isn't talking. What if I need configuration option X and Apple doesn't support it? Well then, you are SOL.
that I made to the VP of Education Sales at Apple that time. OS X 10.0 had just been introduced. It was so new, so different, and so ridiculously bad that I told them "it's just as much work to move people to Windows," so unless this improves, that's what we're doing. And we had already started that migration during the "bad times." However, Apple dug in their heels and kept improving things. Today, we've reversed that migration and more and more people are asking for Macs. Because Apple has been able to develop (or incorporate) enough methods for enterprise management, we're happy to oblige...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
only if it wears protection.....
Five seconds with Google would have spared you this lashing.
Mac OS X System Architecture
Architecture of Mac OS X
UNIX family tree
Please do try to keep up.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
> Huh? What's so hard about doing "Change password..." from 'System Preferences' -> 'Accounts'?
> That works without being an admin-level user, I just tested it on my setup at home with an OD account.
Agreed - if they have access to the console or they are running OSX and connected to the OD. How would a Win32 user get there? Giving a user instructions on connecting via VNC (one at a time since it is a single-user access method) and how to nav to that menu item is worse than the ssh route.
-ebo
the poster makes a good point. macs are more expensive to a degree.
In many companies, EMAIL is the critical app. The market for -=> CORPORATE =- email is almost entirely split between two products (both reviled by /. denizens). Those products, IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange make up the overwhelming majority of mail clients in corporate sites and are themselves split nearly in half (depending on which report you believe).
;-)
So, looking at those products, Microsoft's alternative for the Mac is not really even a full participant in their strategy and effectively relegates users to a web browser environment. IBM's Lotus Notes client for Mac has been on again off again and way behind the PC in functionality -- though they're finally catching up and have expressed a complete commitment to it at long last. The reports from those beta testing the newest versions are very positive.
If you believe that the IBM product for Mac is finally rounding the corner, than at best you have less than half the corporate mail seats out there with a workable Mac alternative, meaning the market for possible Mac penetration is cut in half to begin with.
The good news, is that for about half the corporate market, the Mac is now a very viable platform. Add to that the fact that people LIKE the machines, and that Vista is being forced down the throat of a very reluctant IT industry, and I think you do have room for significant market gain for Apple this year.
Oh, and their commercials are funny.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I agree with you to a point, but some of the issues that matter to corporate users running Windows boxes won't as severely affect those users running Macs. For example, a large deployment may try to be as homogenous as possible so that fewer customizations are needed for the Windows images deployed (and tested, and set up, etc...) on those machines. With Macs, a single OS X image will boot pretty much any modern Mac with the same ISA. That is I can install OS X 10.4 server on a firewire drive attached a PowerBook G3, walk over to a G5 XServe, snap the drive out of the case and in to one of those hot-swappable drive carriers, and reboot off the new hard drive.
There are still many important changes that, popping up at the last minute, could seriously enrage an IT department, but I doubt it's as severe a problem as with Windows. Not that anyone would ever convince a rather conservative IT department of that...
http://images.slashdot.org/hc/84/e031c0ba1b69.jpg
I want 6-hour Call-To-Repair on critical hardware. I can get that from actual enterprise vendors. For not much more than standard 24x7 hardware support, in most cases. Depending on the system (think of a two-socket quad-core VMware ESX host with 16 GB of RAM running 16 to 20 virtual servers - by the way, that works), next business day isn't good enough. And if the system is in any way tied to generating revenue, trust me - spares and support contracts are required. Apple just isn't there.
Of what the corporation need. If they need good visual, by example a design corporation then YES, obviously, if the company have a look trendy then of course, if the company just need it for their secretary then OF COURSE, they need good visual, or if they want to look elegant then of course again!
Oh, wait, that covers almost everything... Of course they can penetrate the corporation!!
ghostbar page.
I had 3 OS X Servers, with upgrade licenses for OS X server, running several desktops. It doesn't just work because debugging is a bitch. If things don't work, Apple's support options are a joke. Microsoft's knowledge base is huge, Apple's non-existant. AFP548.com does not a network make.
One time I had a massive problem with my system, called Apple for support. The Enterprise Support group was closed for a meeting. They left for the entire afternoon, no support for me. I had to send my employees home for the day.
The mail systems are just non-standard location wise to make the online resources for the open source projects not quite useful, and Apple provides almost no utilities for debugging things. The resources aren't quite there.
The hardware is getting there (Mini is an AWESOME general desktop, small in size with nothing to mess with), Xserve is cool, and Xraid means not needing massive RAID arrays in the box. The software is getting there as well, each rev of OS X Server is using more OSS solutions that have been made Enterprise ready by companies like Redhat, and their software is maturing Workgroup Manager gets much better each revision. But the support options just aren't there.
A better indicator than corporate profitability for this question might be profit per worker bee and it might tell you more about how competitive a given market is, or if a company has a monopoly or oligopoly position in its market, than about the potential profitability of the given market. Finding and analyzing actual statistics is left as an exercise.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
People stop using the subject line as the place their comment begins. Sentence fragments make for poor communication.
I spent an entire summer getting a series of 12 versions of a Citrix configurations to work on 300 computers- and it is a good front end for things like oracle databases and spreadsheets (which I had to do the permissions on x_x).
Personally, once people know what they're doing in Citrix, things start to work well. The Mac Citrix client is only missing a few features from the Windows Client, such as some weird browsing stuff some companies use, but overall I've been able to find a workaround for anything the Citrix Client throws at me.
When I was working on our Oracle database permissions, a ""consultant"" made the dumb comment that "That's why we don't use Macs in the enterprise" after I initially tried to configure the Citrix client on my MacBook Pro and could not figure everything out in the first 10 mins of having it. He had to eat his words after my machine beat down the other windows machines where others were doing permissions. Not that I hold a grudge- this was the ""consultant's"" first time setting up permissions in a database. -eek
I went on to make really nice PHP AD tools- people could be unlocked, information entered, viewed, printed- all at the click of a mouse. I also developed a program that created a default user based on their name, and a few other managerial details. Human Resources loved it. An entire list of all employees was availabale (from around the world) was accessible via the admin tools, which ran locally or through Citrix. Ironically, I used my (purchased) copy of BBEdit on the MacBook Pro to do all the coding.
Their current ad campaign is 'Hi, I'm a Mac. I'm just a toy.' / 'And I'm a PC. I'm actually useful.'
That's something they might want to consider changing if they want to encourage corporate users. Some people might think 'Oh, boy, I can make photo albums. That sounds like FUN!' but the boss would rather I was programming a GUI using C++ or making silly graphs than making a photo album of me and my friends.
1) Buy Apple machines when your machines are retired
2) Use MS Site License to put Windows on them all
3) Continue your 3 year replacement cycle.
In 3 years, you can start migrating chunks of the enterprise over to OS X, because your hardware is ready, with no downside.
Make this:
* Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 Merom 2.0GHz Socket M Processor.
* Mobile Intel 945PM Express Chipset.
* Mini tower chassis (serviceable).
* MicroBTX logic board.
* 60GB 3.5" 7200-rpm SATA hard drive, 8 or 16MB cache.
* 2GB DDR2 SO-DIMM PC2-5300.
* PCI-Express 16x slot, with an Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT in it.
* PCI-Express 1x slots.
* Gigabit Ethernet.
* On-board sound.
* Combo Drive.
$999 per system (as spec'ed above).
Stop tying in software and hardware/
The Mac hardware is commonly availabe so we dont have to listen to the PowerPC drivel anymore but its commonly avaiable.
Are their board different? Their HD? Its all the same except you slap on some 'cool' on it.
Its bad enough we have Microsoft locking us in with their software and formats but at least we can use ANY hardware we like with it.
But to lock yourself with hardware makes absolutely no sense.
Its amazing how the fanbois will try to justify their favorite toy.
I still have flashbacks to the first Intel on Mac discussions I had with these big kids: the same ones who had annoyed me for years with their Intel sucks mantra were now doing a 180 about how Intel was always a leader in its field.
An OS which doesnt allow me to use hardware I want is the equivalent of a kit car.
The transition from Windows 2000 and Windows XP to Windows Vista provides a window of opportunity for Apple and others to gain market share, but these vendors have to make an effective business case to the IT managers who make the buying decisions and to the executives and industry analysts who influence those decisions. It's becoming easier to make that case, particularly when companies consider the need to replace their desktop machines to meet the performance requirements for Vista, and look at the need for updated peripherals, drivers, and applications to run on Vista. Then there's the terrible antivirus/firewall software for Windows, typically the inadequate Windows Vista components or the bloated, machine-crippling Symantec Internet Security. Those alone should get people looking at the Apple/MacOS alternative.
But Apple has to act on this opportunity, not just with the consumer-oriented TV ads, but also with enterprise-targeted ads in industry trade publication and analyst briefings that make the case more effectively than has previously been done. We will have to see if Apple does this, or continues to focus on the creative community, the home user, and their iPod/iTunes juggernaut.
I'm a long-term Mac user and even have a working original 128K Mac in my basement. This entry has been created on my shiny new MacBook Pro. I'd love to see Apple have more success in the enterprise but Steve is going to have to lead the charge.
The problem is not just with software support: Apple lacks the enterprise-level hardware support. They do not offer complete care on laptops like Dell does, not even 24x7 or 8x5. What this means is that if your machine breaks you have to either send it back or bring it to an Apple shop that will send it back for you.
I can only guess the same problem occurs with the Xserve. I can get a technician on-site to fix my Dell within 4 hours if that's what I want.
I run Linux on all my machines, so software support is not my primary concern. In my experience Apple has proven that they are not willing/able to provide the type of support that a business customer needs.
People often comment on these threads that there is a problem of people in IT departments and elsewhere being personally hostile to and prejudiced against Macs and Apple. Its true, and it happens because Apple marketing has deliberately denigrated all users of all other products at a personal level, and it puts peoples backs up.
The first thing they will have to do is revamp their marketing, disassociate themselves from the MacZealot tendency, stop positioning themselves as 'cool' and superior. Get away from 'think different' totally.
As long as they engage in culture wars, the other side will respond in kind, and you'll have a lot of people, as now, saying over my dead body to Macs in the corporation.
Oh, and they need to allow OSX to run on third party hardware, as well. Yes, its the same problem.
With those tight buns and some makeout music, you bet!
Not an iMac, I don't need a second display. Not a Mini, upgradebility and serviceability is a mess (even worse than the iMac). And the MacPro is too powerful and too expensive.
... These are wonderful solutions for me, for developers or other technical guys. But not for widespread use in corporations.
A Mini Tower with a normal board, those MacPro drive bays with normal 3.5 inch drives, normal DDR2-RAMs (and not those notebook thingies) and expandability with 2 or 3 PCI-X slots would be a killer. Call it Mac. The best thing: 3.5 inch drives are cheaper than 2.5 inch drives and normal RAM is cheaper than S0-DIMMs. So these machines should not be pricier than the Minis.
Those people talking about putty knifes and serviceability in one sentence have not seen an Optiplex oder sth similiar from HP in their lifes before.
Btw. any sane system administrator will kill you, when you suggest dual booting or VMWare as good solutions to the problem of switching (liek the submitor of the article does). Come on, this guy has already too much to do supporting and securing one OS, never think of two OSes simultaniously
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
If you're talking about a larger business, there is a good chance custom Win32 applications are being run, and those are a problem. But if they're relatively new applications written with C#/.Net, you have a fair chance of porting them to run under Mono with little difficulty (presuming Mono runs on OSX.)
The basic Microsoft office automation applications are available for Macs. I know several people who use MS Office on the Mac to deal with people who run under Windows.
Common applications like Opera and Firefox already run under Linux. So does the Java/Eclipse/JBoss/OSS stack that many developers work with on data center/web service applications.
There is little the basic business desktop needs that isn't available on a Mac or on Linux, and Macs have some plug-and-play maintenance advantages that Linux doesn't -- namely you buy boxes pre-installed for a known price without adding a third-party installation/deployment company to the mix. Even better -- they work.
Don't forget you can run any X-Windows application on a Mac, including cross-compiled OSS applications and utilities. Those do port easily, and many have been made available. You don't have to rewrite all the interfaces to the OSX Aqua GUI APIs.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I've started up two companies in the past. The next one I start up, I will provision primarily with Apple OS X Machines. So little downtime, no reinstallations, no viruses, very productive, quality hardware, and Unix under the hood for the type of development we do. No longer will there need to be a distinction between Marketing and Development's hardware. My Unix developers have portable workstations, while having a great desktop, and all the necessary productivity apps. Plus a cheap copy of Parallels desktop and an XP License for anyone who needs to do compatability testing or run specific Windows apps.
It'd be worth the slight premium (although even the premium is arguable, given the quality and features of the gear you get).
It would also be good for morale; people get excited about a shiny new OS/X machine with a slick UI, rather than yet-another-PC with endless Windows configuration ahead of them.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I got a MacBook on Labor Day, and have loved it. My intent was for personal use. A funny thing happened, though. My company is a partner with Microsoft, so most of our stuff is Word/Excel/PowerPoint (AKA Devil Spawn)/Exchange. As we have an extremely mobile workforce, most of our tools are web based, even accessible, with security, via the Public Internet. With a copy of Office 2004 in hand, I've found that, on days when I want to work from home (or am off but unexpectedly have to do something), the majority of my work can be done from my Mac. Usually, the limiting factor is the documents I happen to have on hand. The only things I can't do is things in Project, Visio, or submit my time report (which I find rather odd they haven't moved it to the web). With Google's office suite becoming increasingly viable (not as full-featured as Office, but probably has great fit-to-purpose), I think we're seeing great enablers for the desktop to move away from Microsoft. They will become a player, not the player.
Apple is interested in building great experiences using computers--you hear Jobs talk about it all the time. But corporations develop and determine their own experiences based on their industry, their policies, the apps they use, and their staff training. The question is whether Apple is willing to subsume its control of experience to individual corporations, and I think the answer is pretty clearly no. Rather, they choose to pursue business segments whose experiences align well with Apple's--creative, publishing, science, education, small businesses, etc. These plus all consumers is a pretty darn big potential market--bigger than the balance of corporate America, actually.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
a) Target small businesses. Mac Mini + 17" monitor + MS Office or Apple's own software suite. Value proposition, higher entry point but long shelf life.
b) Once established, target corporates with their servers with driveless Mac Minis acting as terminals.
c) Software as a service and local applications combined to offer a reliable, intuitive and compelling solution.
Think this a dream? Not so, we (O'WONDER) have already pursuaded some trial customers to scrap their PCs and use our own web services under Firefox. Ironically, one chose a more expensive 20" iMac over a Mac Mini. The trial continues.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Well, I would have to call into question the financial responsibility of any IT manager
buying boatloads of Apple equipment for any department other than research, marketing, or publication.
Most standard users not explicitly needing EXCEL or some other windows based software
could make due with a $200 PC running standard Puppy Linux with Open Office installed.
And any Widnows applications could be run from a Citrix Server.
Rolling out hundreds of Apple Pros to everyone would be a bit expensive,
once you add RAM, applications, etc. I priced this out as a joke for
my boss once, weighing in somewhere around $3.4 million, without software. Ouch.
Apple needs a new computer type: the Work Mac PC
- a step up from the iMac, but lower than the Mac Pro.
A budget desktop with slim microATX style case, 1GB RAM, and a decent CPU.
Make CD/DL DVD burner, keyboard, mouse, everything else, optional.
Provide various hard drive sizes, or no hard drive, just an internal 8GB flash drive for booting.
Typical corporate security features preloaded with everything needed so it is easy to manage, remotely control, and remotely update.
A step up from a thin client machine, easily upgradable for the 'power users', but the base configuration works for all the other worker drones in the corporation.
Mac Minis are too easy to 'vanish' in a corporation.
So far it looks like most of this discussion is about whether or not Apple hardware is up to the job, and whether client/server configurations are laid down in efficient manners so IT departments can effectively manage them.
Well, my answer is no, and the reason has almost nothing to do with the computers themselves. Honestly, it's the company support.
I work as a systems administrator at a private K-12 campus, ~500 workstations, ~1000 students, ~250 faculty (each with a laptop, as part of our program). We're almost entirely Apple computer based, with some PCs for parts of the business offices and development teams. And of course, in the life of any school, computers get damaged, abused, broken, crashy, or whatnot, and have to be sent back to Apple for repair/replacement.
Calling up Apple has been an interesting experience. Some times I'll get some guy who thinks I'm some dumbass who can't tell the mouse from my coffee cup. Some times I'll get some guy who doesn't want to bother troubleshooting, just have me send it in regardless. Some times I'll get some guy who actually believes me when I tell him the steps we've gone through diagnosing a machine, and will work with me to see if I got every possibility.
Honestly? Apple doesn't have a separate support line for education, or for corporations- everyone gets filtered through the same front line of telephone operators, perhaps half of which are actually intelligent enough to be worth the time you spend on hold. I don't like having to explain over and over again that yes, I've restarted, yes I've zapped the PRAM, yes I've done fsck, yes I've done BLAH BLAH BLAH SHUT UP AND LET ME SEND THE DAMN BROKEN MOTHERBOARD IN. Granted with Apple's usual consumer base (many people with less than ideal experience with computers), I'd expect your average caller to be a barely literate technophobe; why is there no "opt-to-be-smarter" option? Why is there no set of people who see that I work with a school, I've called many times before and sent many machines back and forth, and have a record of experience with the company? Why is there no separate group of people I can talk to that actually know the technical details I need, different from the usual crop of mildly experienced frontmen answering phones?
Why should I have to go through the crap level of tech support just to hope that I find someone smart? Where's the support for education and corporate methods of deployment, tech support, maintenance, etc.?
If Apple can't provide that, they can never be considered a true corporate vendor. There are times I question their title as an education vendor.
I do not see Apple getting much into corporate but I can easily see them being used in small buisnessess where people are working themselves and have their own buisness and do not want to have any problems.
XNU has BSD code in it, but it is not BSD anymore than it is I/O Kit, and its foundation is based on Mach. Perhaps you think that the operating system is more important than the kernel, but if that's the case, you should say so instead of erroneously attacking the correct assertion that OS X does not use a BSD kernel.
English is easier said than done.
We bought an XServe and XRaid. Generally very happy with it. However, when it came time to renew the maintenance Apple told us that it was no longer available (we are about 1/5 hours from big city). Bye-bye Apple.
"...you can build on your own using the same spec parts...."
IT departments build PCs? Don't most of them just go to Dell or HP and buy in bulk? I can't imagine some poor harried IT guy trying to build, say, 500 boxes from scratch.
Some here make it sound as if there are ZERO Macs in corporate america. Nothing could be farther from the truth. They are there already, in smaller numbers and doing specific jobs.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
Mac OS X Server
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
ARD task server is several generations behind Active Directory, Redhat Satellite, et al.
UNIX has management tools that scale, like cfengine, bcfg2, puppet, et al. Microsoft has AD, and a million vendors willing to sell you more. Apple doesn't. You may be able to achieve some success by trying to bolt on cfengine, radmind, or something similar, but it can be ugly.
OpenDirectory is kerberized OpenLDAP with "Apple Juice" put in, in the name of PasswordServer. PasswordServer is fragile, unreplicated, undocumented, and almost completely imnossible to recover from when it goes nuts. (Your entire authentication directory is stored in a berkeley db4 file on the OSX server box).
Apple's documentation on the intricacies of OSX client, server, and/or any of the add-on/bolt-on tools generally is non-existant, incomplete, useless and/or wrong. Most of their man pages are direct lifts from FreeBSD or NextStep for cripes sake!
Apple does cross-platform one way. You may be able to get to a Windows box from a Mac using Terminal Services. You may be able to get to a UNIX box from it. But just try to admin a Mac from another platform -- it is almost impossible without another Mac and ARD. The command line tools are crap, again badly documented, generally not supported by Apple, and repeatedly warned against in their extremely scant documentation.
Diagnosis of common error/failure conditions is a joke with Apple. Try syslog consolidation and monitoring on these things, and watch the crap fly by. I'm still wondering why dos2unixtime calls are a KERNEL facility warning. Speaking of syslog, Apple seems to have completely broken the concept of facility and priority. EG: EVERYTHING from am OSX box for facility kernel comes at priority DEBUG -- from resource fork warnings to disk failures.
Oh, and lets not forget that Apple will not accept syslog messages as valid issues -- if syslog reports that a disk is dying, no joy from Apple support. If syslog reports a DIMM is failing, again, no joy. "Syslog is not a supported tool". Oh, they also don't accept the SMART logs from disks.
If you are lucky enough to get Apple hardware support to listen to you, be prepared to wait 3+ weeks for them to deal with it. Be prepared for them to send the wrong parts. Be prepared for them to lie about the work they've done.
Apple's "patches" rival even NT4 service packs for instability and breakage. From apps not working to peripheral hardware (like the monitor) going out, to the machine dying. Again, a stunning lack of support from Apple.
Compare this to Sun support, or Redhat, or even Dell's.
With Sun, I filed a call over an 8 year old disk that didn't support SCSI SMART (SCSI spec calls it Instruction Exception). Sun dug through, and found the old patches (for solaris 2.5 *shrug*) that included IE support.
With Redhat, I've filed a call over bonding, that roped in the guys from Redhat, the guy who wrote bonding, and the guy who wrote the NIC driver.
With Dell, I can explain the conditions I'm seeing, what I've done, etc, and convince them to send me parts.
With Apple, I can't even call unless I pretend to be the 25 year old female thats listed as our support contact.
The only "enterprise" Apple is ready for is Scotty trying to use the mouse as a microphone.
Smart Cards? http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304 035
Certificates? Yeah it does that little standard called X.509. It uses the keychain to manage these for the users, and Mac OS X Server can even be a CA using OpenSSL.
Distributed Policy Management? Oh, you can do that with Open Directory on Mac OS X Server.
Packaged Software Distribution? Ok, Apple doesn't really have their own infrastructure for this, but there are 3rd party ones that work as good as anything Apple could hope for. Try FileWave. http://www.filewave.com/
Please research a bit next time before pointing out a bunch of crap that is wrong.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
If I may be so bold to link it, I wrote a similarly themed article a few weeks ago: http://babygotmac.com/a/133 My points were along the lines of adding collab tools that could augment/replace Exchange/Sharepoint, and offer everything through an easily managed appliance. Additionally, adding online Backup and iSync to a corporate server would kick ungodly amounts of ass. I look forward to the day when I have easily licensed, easily managed tools at my disposal to implement throughout my multiplatform organization...
There are still many important changes that, popping up at the last minute, could seriously enrage an IT department, but I doubt it's as severe a problem as with Windows. Not that anyone would ever convince a rather conservative IT department of that...
That's a very user-desktop-centric point of view and your concession that conservative IT would still want this is not only correct, but they're right and you're not. All the big corporate accts I work with insist on roadmap transpearancy from ALL vendors inlcuding big RISC/UNIX and mainframe system vendors (which have no Windows tie in) - in fact this becomes MORE important when the systems become more mission critical and complex.
Apple makes great theatre with Jobs yearly MacWorld announcements, but this is so far from the detailed, non-disclosure timelines and product direction information that corporates require that, long after Apple had ditched the secrecy for business, competing vendors will be making jokes about Apple having just moved from being a "consumer toy company". ( And I think Apple could have a very compelling end-to-end technology story for corporates)
Man, organise a trial of OSX server with Open Directory before you start speaking your prejudices out loud. OD can do exactly that, since you can replicate a thusly configured configuration to all your users. OD is, on top of that, compatible with AD and NDS, and openLDAP, for that matter.
There are several BSD servers, and Mac OS X provides one of them. It is compatible with the APIs known collectively as "BSD". That's what it is. That's not simply true because it's what Apple says, it's true because there is an objective measure, known as the BSD API which is provided by Mac OS X. Even if Apple never actually used the words UNIX and BSD anywhere, ever, Mac OS X would still be a UNIX in the family of BSD because that's what it is.
I can't respond to "Perhaps you think that the operating system is more important than the kernel" because I don't know what that means. I will, however, try to explain *why* I think that phrase *has no meaning* and neither does the original "claim".
The discussion of the "correct assertion" you accuse me of "attacking" begins here, with a more correct assertion:
Sure, because anything you do on an OS X server, you are doing on a BSD server.
The post parent above that is about licensing.
The (vague) claim you refer to and suport is here:
Not really. An OS X server isn't running a BSD kernel. And, really, that sums it up.
Well, that doesn't sum it up, really. There isn't even much to attack, because it's a baseless assertion which employs incorrect terminology. Somebody who has no clue is spouting buzz words. I can't attack the claim, because there isn't any there there. Know what I mean? I am attacking, if anything, the dogmatic approach to a technical discussion.
Assuming for the moment there is a little tiny bit of there there, let's look at it closer. Which BSD kernel is your golden standard, then? Pick one, I don't really care. How about SunOS 4.3. (SunOS was considered the pinnacle of BSD by a lot of people for a lot of years, and it doesn't even have BSD in the name! ) Next, take a peek at some other systems people "claim" to be BSD, peek at their I/O architectures, their command line interfaces, their device driver architectures, their virtual memory managers, their process schedulers and... what do you know! Major differences! Entirely different code! Entirely different algorithms! Entirely different architectures with different abstractions! By what appears to be your "BSD truthiness yardstick", NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or any other system you want to look at isn't running a "BSD kernel" any more than is Mac OS X/Darwin.
jcr made the claim that when you are using Mac OS X you are using a BSD server. This is reasonable, correct, and dare I say even obvious to those familiar with the usage of the term "server" as in "BSD server" which is the abstract component of the operating system, often but not necessarily compiled into the kernel, which provides the BSD API to the applications.
This is not a religious issue, nor is it dogma, it's objective (although admittedly non-trivial) fact. It becomes a religious issue only for people who don't take the time to understand the various ways in which the overloaded term "server" is used in a given context, nor grasp the many layers of abstraction in a modern operating system nor the fact that they can be combined in various ways to make an operating system--of which the "kernel" is simply one part.
(Incidentally, this type of conflict might seem familiar. Religious dogmatics on one side, rationalists coming from many different religious and even non-religious backgrounds on the other. Ring any bells? If you guessed "Al Queda" vs. "The West" aka "America and the democratic nations of the free world, oh, and Saudi Arabia" aka "The Great Satan", you get a free beer. If you also named "Dominionists" or "American Fascists" vs. "Liberal Free Thinkers (be they Democratic, Republican, Green or Independent)" you get extra credit. I'm intrigued by the ease with which dogma gets tossed around in debates among geeks on slashdot about things w
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I keep seeing people say this, but from experience, the corporate world DOES NOT work this way.
HP and Fujitsu do not provide roadmaps for their products. I'm not sure about Dell and IBM as I dont handle those accounts. The only companies I know of that DO provide roadmaps of their products are the CPU guys, Intel and AMD.
Honestly, for desktops, laptops and servers what would a roadmap get you?
(PHB voice)"Hey Jim, next year Dell is going to introduce a new desktop that will maximize our CSR performance 10 fold while reducing our training expenditures by half!"(/end PHB voice)
yeah right....
the history of the world
You weren't replying to who I thought you were.
Seriously folks, I see nothing in the parent's post that's funny.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."