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."

Comments

Might be a smart move for businesses

[edwardpickman]

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.

Re:Say what?

[DogDude]

Even SCO doesn't lock you into proprietary hardware.

Re:Are you sure?

[Dun Malg]

Once you've got the MAC hardware, with windows dual booting or in a VM, you can slowly rework those applications that need to be, where it is appropriate. It's not going to happen overnight, and in some companies it's certainly not worth doing. But that doesn't make it impossible. VM, maybe. But you sound like an idiot suggesting dual booting. How, pray tell, do you migrate your apps from one platform to another with dual booting? Say, for example, they migrate the inventory tracking app to OSX/Cocoa first. All the rest of the apps are still Wintel. When someone comes into your office and asks "Hey Joe, how many widgets are in warehouse 3", do you say "Hold on while I fucking reboot into OSX"? No, dual booting is no better than just dumping all wintel in one fell swoop, as it requires migrating all apps at once.

Jesus, people, think, don't just type shit.

Re:Are you sure?

[gb506]

But why are you making this switch?

Because we want an OS that doesn't require draconian security policies, and that's not windows. Because we want an OS designed with usability as a fundamental requirement, and that's not Linux.

And above all, because we want to spend the majority of our waking hours working with an OS that doesn't suck shit. Is that too much to ask?