IBM's Pilot Program For Internal Use of Macs

geoffrobinson writes "Roughly Drafted has obtained internal IBM documents detailing the results of a small pilot program for internal use of Macs. Positive and negative results were detailed, but overall most participants were happy with their Mac experience. The pilot will be expanded this year. One advantage cited: less reliance on Windows. So it seems a mix of Macs, PCs, and Linux boxes are in IBM's future. Given the history between IBM and Microsoft, this is quite interesting."

Comments

The numbers are insignificant, but..

[Tibor the Hun]

The numbers of testers may be insignificant compared to the IBMs whole workforce, but IBM is seeing the front line, and is adjusting itself.
Think about it, they have a lot of IT savvy folks, who know a thing or two about operating systems. And especially Unix/Linux. Why would those folks be pushing for their competitor's platform (Microsoft) as opposed to staying truly cross platform compatible.

The OS is becoming more irrelevant nowdays. Some folks at IBM are seeing that and adjusting accordingly.
(And saving money on CALs to boot...)

Powerbook 2400c

[argent]

IBM has built Mac laptops before.

The Powerbook 2400c was made for Apple by IBM Japan.

I would assume that the group responsible ended up on the Lenovo side of the line, and I would love to see an Apple branded Thinkpad.

Why I enjoyed reading this post.

[4g1vn]

More and more companies are starting to realize the Microsoft conundrum. 1) How do we properly license upcoming products (Server 2008, SQL 2008, etc...)? Spend an eight hour session and you MAY figure it out. 2) Let's standardize on a document format (.doc). OK, here comes Office 2007 with (.docx). WTF is that, and it's the default when saving a new document. Shame on you Microsoft. 3) Vista promotion. It's better than XP, blah, blah, blah. No, it sucks, and was rushed to market. I use it (I'm forced) and very few of my network utilities work properly. Hats off to IBM for making a bold but, intelligent decision.

Re:I thought it's a joke

[Zashi]

You have no idea how true this is.

I work at IBM in the super lab testing those Big Iron servers.

I *have* to use a windows workstation. They used to allow RHEL based workstations but stopped a short while before I started working here. I test predominantly Linux (RHEL and SLES) and occasionally Windows. We had to test Windows Server 2008 aka Longhorn (which amusingly is identified as Vista in virtually every piece of software).

Regarding the Unix vs. windows workstations: Apparently the developers here use windows workstations because when I tried to install a Linux utility all the shell scripts wouldn't run. Being the savy linux user I am I quickly realized that all the shell scripts were in windows format (with CRLF for line terminators instead of just LF). They were getting ready to SHIP this software out to enterprise level customers, but luckily we caught it.