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Why Consumer Macs Are Enterprise-Worthy
cyberkahn tips us to an article in Computerworld that makes the case for Apple's consumer machines moving into corporations. (The article dismisses Linux desktops in the enterprise in a single bullet item.) With the press that Vista has been getting, is Apple moving into a perfect storm? Quoting: "There is no comparison between Apple's 'consumer' machines and the consumer lines of its competitors. All of Apple's machines are ready to move into the enterprise, depending on the job at hand. The company's simple and elegant product line, which is also highly customizable, will be Apple's entree to the business market — if IT decision-makers can get over their prejudice against equipment that's traditionally been aimed at consumers."
"(The article dismisses Linux desktops in the enterprise in a single bullet item.)" And how is this still considered a noteworthy article?
if IT decision-makers can get over their prejudice against equipment that's traditionally been aimed at consumers.
They really think that's what's holding back Macs in the enterprise? I'm pretty sure the problem isn't prejudice against hardware, but integration issues that arise when moving from an all-MS shop to a mixed environment with OS X. The ROI needs to outweigh the obstacles, and it currently doesn't.
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I want to know what the big deal is between not using Linux because it has too many options. Majority of the distros are either based on Debian or Red Hat. I haven't seen software that only worked on one distro, and things like apt-get, yum, synaptic, and all the other package managers can be installed on most of the distros. That just doesn't seem like a valid reason to automatically dismiss any Linux solution. Just use one distro throughout the whole comapny, problem solved.
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Macs are not enterprise ready. The computers, save for the Mac Pro's, are not easily serviceable by IT departments, unlike, say, Thinkpads. Ever try changing a hard drive of a Macbook Pro? You don't wanna get stuck doing that. Also, Exchange dominates the corporation fields. Mac OS X has a long way to go in the aspects of group policy, and other details that Windows offers that admins need. Sure, you might be able to make hacks in the OS to make things work the way you want it, but Linux is a better option if you want a UNIX-like OS.
And its utter bullshit.
I suspect that Apple definitely does NOT want to enter a cut throat world of competition where it becomes just an also ran competing on price with a thousand corporate buyers, when it can design kick-ass product in the consumer market place.
This was written by a misguided (and severely deluded,) fan-boy.
The PC wars are long over. Get over it. Microsoft won. (So they're now tied to the office and that kind of ugly industrial design. [Think BROWN Zune. Yuck!])
Apple is a whole lot better positioned to compete in the vastly more profitable consumer arena.
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Even if we assume, just for the sake of argument, that OS X is "enterprise ready", the fact that Apple hardware comes from a single company makes Macintosh an unacceptable choice. The fact that that company also has a very limited product range makes it even less feasible.
For security reasons, you should have abandoned NIS long ago, and OpenDirectory works just beautifully with OSX, Linux, and Windows clients. Turn on the ssh daemon, and your ssh -X, etc work just fine, and Macs understand NFS, as well as other file systems just fine. In other words, there is no reason to do anything to your RAID array other than tell the Macs where it is and what protocol to use to connect to it. There are also tools, of course, to enable you to make standardized disk images with configurable parameters and use those for future client installs.
I'm running my entire lab off OS-X, with a compute cluster and file system integrated into distributed desktops (OSX and Linux. We had a windows but I sensibly turned it off when we bought the first IntelMac), and not so much as a hiccup. The main problems you're describing are the classic, "it looks unixy, so I'm going to treat it as if it were a Linux box." No, it's a Mac, descended from NeXTs. Get the Apple docs out (dreadful though they may be), read a little of "The Mac Way", and quit fighting it. I found most of my problems at first arose from trying to treat Macs as if they were just nice-looking RedHat boxes, rather than something different.
Pardon for sounding rude, but it sounds like you've learned one system, and aren't willing to attempt to learn another. Current Macs are one of the easiest machine to integrate into a mixed environment that I've encountered, and this is after over a decade and a half of running various Unices, Linuces, Windows, and VMS systems in mixed environments.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
My own preferences for corporate desktops would be, in order, Linux, then Windows, then Mac.
In a corporate network environment, the flexibility of Linux desktops is unparalleled. You can optimize your storage needs (and not pay for 300 copies of an OS sitting on 300 hard drives, for example), and you can move applications around the network seemlessly without the users even noticing (useful when one app server gets overloaded). Sure there is a learning curve for the IT department, but on the desktop side, just make sure that for the less techie people, that everything is easily accessible. In fact, I have never found the learning curve to be an obstacle ("we depend on Quickbooks and their support" is a bigger one). In short, an intelligent Athena-style deployment of Linux systems (along with a move to diskless workstations wherever possible) could save a company a bundle on IT and improve productivity. The big issue is that the migration takes time.
Mac's have actually less flexibility than Windows despite the *nix base. You can only buy the systems from Apple, and the really nice aspects of an Athena-style deployment are not possible. Add to that the more limited choices of hardware, and you have some real concerns.
I am not saying tht Macs have no place in the corporate network. THere are places where they are probably very helpful including media production and the like. However, they would not be my first or even second choice for a corporate general-purpose desktop.
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Apple's desire to fix the issues can be summed up in the words, "can we make money doing it?"
It's easy to write a checklist of features that would make up a dream enterprise service package. It's harder to make that package turn a profit in the market. And it's easy for companies to use checklists to justify sticking with the status quo rather than trying something new.
Someone earlier in the thread mentioned 4-hour onsite service, for instance.. for desktop machines, not xServes sitting back in the machine room. Lemme tell ya: I've worked for a couple of large companies and have never seen an IT deal that involves 4-hour onsite service guarantees for any random PC sitting on an everyday worker's desktop. Mission-critical servers, yes. Buy-em-by-the-carload boxes that let users connect to the mission-critical servers? Not a chance. Keeping those running is what the IT department's job. And even then, good luck getting 4-hour turnaround on any issue that doesn't cause significant financial losses from the moment it crops up to the moment the system is fixed and running again. For problems that can be stopped by pulling the network cable out of the wall and shutting off the machine, that's exactly as much ASAP service as you'll get. Anything else will happen later, maybe, if it turns out that we really have to.
These checklists of 'things Apple has to do to compete in the enterprise market' smell to me more like excuses not to spend time exploring alternatives than things people would actually buy if Apple made them available.
Companies don't buy Macs because they don't use Macs now. Simple as that. They already have a large and complex body of hardware and software doing mission-critical things, and it all more or less works the way it is. Adding more machines that are basically the same is known to be reasonably easy. Even if there are teething problems, those tend to get identified early and worked around. Trying something new raises the spectre of potential compatability issues in any of a million undocumented places.
Apple will gain entry to the enterprise market as enterprises move away from proprietary formats and protocols, thus making it easy to fit any standards-compliant machine into the system. And even then, someone will have to lock the beancounters out of the room long enough to explain that a low cost of acquisition does not necessarily equal low TCO.
Of course, a series of negative miracles could happen to Dell (they're in a bad patch right now, but I think they can turn it around) and make Apple look like an island of stability in a PC market that's fighting to rebalance itself.
Example: Consider an office building with 500 people working there, a basic mid-sized office for most companies. The marketing department will make up about 25-30 people, of which only 5-10 will need to use photoshop or any other memory intensive app that is arguably better suited for the mac. Upper management will also manifest about 15-20 people, of which it's likely easier to get them macs. I'd acknowledge that there MAY be as much as another 20 people who could make an excuse for why they need the features that come on the most minimal mac rather than a PC that's slightly scaled down from that level.
At the very most, in this example, I could 70 people (out of 500), that are somehow better served by getting a mac (noting of course that I'm comparing against a completely barebones windows PC). $900 for the mac, let's say $650 for the pc (since we might as well have 512 megs of ram and make sure the monitor is 17 inch). Do I really need to write out the math, or is the point made yet? 900 x 500 = $450,000, or 650 x 500 = $325,000 + $5000 in selective upgrades = $330,000.
A difference of $120,000 will pay for an extra IT guy (if the current group wasn't already enough) and it's cover hardware replacements, and be a good chunk of money towards the next upgrade/replacement cycle (which will come no sooner than it would with the Mac). Certainly a theoretical example, and it's not precise, but it is reasonable and it shows there's a huge difference...which means even if I've got a couple of minor errors, it still proves the point.
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