Macs Gaining a Bigger Role In Enterprise

rev_media tips a short article up at InfoWorld giving some numbers on the increasing Mac presence in businesses. "We're seeing more requests outside of creative services to switch to Macs from PCs," notes the operations manager for a global advertising conglomerate. They "now [support] 2,500 Macs across the US — nearly a quarter of all... US PCs." Another straw in the wind: "Security firm Kapersky Labs has already created a Mac version of its anti-virus software for release should Mac growth continue (and the Mac thus [find] itself prey to more hackers)."

Comments

what's Kapersky labs working on now?

[Anonymous Coward]

oh yeah - mac viruses!

Re:Fed up with MS

[flyingfsck]

Do you realize that Asus alone, sells more Linux laptops than Apple sells Macs?

Software mostly equals digital office supplies

[NDPTAL85]

About that philosophical difference..... seeing as how a lot of computer software is the equivalent of digital office supplies how good does it feel to be giving away your labor (if you actually are a programmer that is) to enable others to freeload off of the electronic versions of Staples / Office Max's products?

Don't get the analogy?

Word processing software - Typewriters/mechanical word processors
Email,IM,IRC - Pens, Paper, Envelopes, Stamps
Database software - Filing cabinets
Spreadsheet software - Calculators and ledgers

There are exceptions of course, video games aren't office productivity tools. They're the equivalent of board games.

But still with so much software resembling something you could buy from Staples 20 years ago, it kinda takes the "righteousness" out of the whole free software movement. Shoplift something from Staples or Office Max and see if you still have the feeling you are a part of an important "movement".

Re:I've been programming on a mac for years

[RiotingPacifist]

Why would you want to run windows in parrallels?
current situation, you have a dedicated working windows box for some reason cost = 0
your solution get a mac $$$
get parallels $$$
move programs across to the VM

so instead of 1 thing that can fail youve just spent a shitload of money to add 2 points of failure to your system. Smoooth!

Re:Just goes to show ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even retards can usually remember to click the "Post Anonymously" checkbox. Who's inferior now?

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

[drinkypoo]

It has never occurred to me until your post that Macs may be resisted in the enterprise due to job security.

I sat in front of Win2k, WinXP, and OSX 10.4 on a Dual G5. Win2k ran on a P4 at 2.4GHz or so. WinXP on my Core Duo. WinXP was most reliable per hour of use, Win2k was most responsive, and the Mac just pissed me off to no end. It was by far the crashiest (mostly in terms of the finder going unresponsive and force quit not working - it would just beachball eternally, I let it spin the ball over the weekend once and only produced a lot of heat.)

My basic feeling on this issue is that anyone who goes Mac over Linux for enterprise is a fucking wacko. Offense intended. They seem to have similar levels of issues with interoperability over time (e.g. in 10.3, OSX would refuse to let you create filenames with [ or ] characters in them on SMB shares, claiming that it was an invalid character... I mean, come ON) and the minor versions are a moving target, with critical shareware applications (I hate to have to say that, but one example is the Quark XPress import plugin for InDesign) quickly abandoning support for "old" versions (say, one or two minor versions ago) meaning that you are absolutely forced into the upgrades.

Meanwhile, OSX is the least responsive OS I have ever used. And I just want to say that when I compare the Dual G5 running 10.2, 10.3, or 10.4 to my past experience, this includes Domain/OS on Apollo DN3000, IRIX 5.3 on the Indigo R3000, Slackware Linux 2.0 with kernel 1.1.47 on a 386DX25 with 8MB, whatever. OSX is just a highly polished turd. They have a microkernel architecure, but they use the microkernel only as a HAL because it is really not up to process management; they use display PDF for display elements, which only increases overhead since the graphics card can't understand it natively; the library of software is and will always continue to be less than Windows or Linux; and finally, only in the highest end does the system not come at a price premium, with the lowest-end Apple systems being horribly overpriced for their level of performance. Even then, you definitely have to purchase expanded memory and disk from third party vendors, because of the usual Apple Premium.

Finally, you simply can not trust Apple. They have shown themselves to be sneaky and underhanded at so many points in the past I can't even describe it. My favorite, because it hurt me the most, was the Rev.1 B&W G3 CMD IDE chip implementation error. Other machines (like Sun Ultra 5) use the same CMD IDE chip successfully, but on the G3 there are serious problems with DMA transfer modes. Some hard disks seem to work fine, but MOST disks will cause DMA errors during periods of heavy CPU activity (which is pretty much all the time on the B&W G3 with a 350MHz processor.) Apple's initial response was to publish a technote instructing customers to either buy a PCI IDE controller (at least four times the price of the same precise thing for the PC) or to buy a hard disk toolkit which could install a driver which will tell the disk to operate only in PIO mode, thus costing you CPU time (no DMA) and making disk access slower. Apple deleted this article when rolling the old techinfo library into the Apple Knowledge Base - there are older articles, and newer articles, but they dropped that one. What can we learn from this episode?

1. Apple does not care if they commit an error and harm their customers unless there are enough complainers to constitute a class action suit.
2. Apple will actually go out of their way to hide past evidence of their misdeeds; Even Microsoft has a complete collection of similar documents which goes back to about DOS 5.

Apple doesn't love you. Apple doesn't care about you. They just want your money. Also, the moment you want to do something they don't think you should do, the level of difficulty rises sharply. It's more possible to do these things today because the OS is better-documented and based more on standards than any of the non-*BSD/Linux competition. But there are still numerous problems that you don't have with Linux, which should be sufficient to motivate the rational individual to go that direction instead.