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The Mac In the Gray Flannel Suit
oDDmON oUT points us to a BusinessWeek story about the increasing use of Apple products in the corporate sector. Many companies are finding that their employees are pushing for the transition more than Apple itself. Quoting:
"While thousands of other companies scratch and claw for the tiniest sliver of the corporate computing market, Apple treats this vast market with utter indifference. After a series of failed offensives by the company in the 1980s and 1990s, Chief Executive Steve Jobs decided to focus squarely on consumers and education customers when he returned to Apple in 1997. As a result, the company doesn't have ranks of corporate salespeople or armies of repairmen waiting to respond every time a hard drive fails. He believes it's difficult for any company, including his, to be effective at satisfying both corporate buyers and consumers."
I can't imagine what it would be like having to fight that shiny white plastic in able to swap out parts... No Thanks.
Http://Stineomite.org (Yeah Thats Right I'm An Organization)
So having this gap in the market for corporate mac support really opens up the possibilities for businesses to spring up and take advantage of these needs. Apple authorizes repair shops so they can repair systems under applecare... one problem is that a lot of things aren't supported under applecare and applecare is only valid for 3 years after the purchase date.
All it would take is a shop to stock up on parts, offer extended care, data recovery and on-site services. In Manhattan there are a couple of shops that offer some of this, but they are mostly targetting users who don't want to ship their machine to apple or need a quick answer for unsupported systems (TekServe and others), but I don't feel that they are taking advantage of the corporate market.
I, being one of two apple users in my department, have realized that although apple has added the capability to join a windows domain, the SSO support is lacking and there are a couple of shortcomings in their implementation. Running a mac in a windows environment isn't quite as seemless in some critical places (SSO, as I said, but also browsing the network, connecting to sharepoint and if the network is flakey or goes down, logging back into the machine can take a long time if the machine has trouble communicating with the directory server). OSX also offers no default lock-screen option like windows does... Although you can have it "show login window" from the fast users witching menu, activating that with the keyboard requires 3rd party add-ons. I use Quicksilver's FastLogout option.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
And a lot of corporate users are on mid towers they also like to reuse displays from older systems and like to swap out hard disks / not have to send them off to have them replaced.
The imac / mini are not that easy to be opened up and you can void the warranty by doing so. They also don't have send off a hard disk with data on it. HP and others let's you keep the bad hard disk and get a new one.
also the mini is not a good buy next to other systems at the same price and the mac pro is over kill for most users. AIO do not fit in to corporate use of systems and other AIO out there make it a lot easier to swap out HDD's as well.
A good $700-$2100 mid tower will be a nice fit in a corporate setting.
There laptops can use some work as well like an 15" screen at $1200-$1900 not $2000 and up.
License the rights to someone who cares. I'm sure Lenovo would love to market a range of "ThinkMac" laptops to business users.
Apple is not focused there because that need is being rapidly assumed by consoles.
Some console games even support mouse/keyboard for FPS control.
With HD TV even just at 720p, you have resolution that is acceptable to just about anyone, and you don't have to do all the work of updating drivers and such - the platforms handle updates quite well as to the games.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The problem with Windows at my workplace is that it comes pre-crippled with Tivoli Endpoint, mandatory anti-virus and various other pieces of adminware. If even some of these were not available for Mac, that would be a good reason to switch. Of course, that would also prevent the change, but one can always dream...
What is the real requirement that would make you pick Macs over Linux or Windows?
Excluding creative firms, most companies have a really short list of genuine requirements. Track a few gigabytes worth of numbers (total, across the company), deal with e-mail, exchange a few documents. You don't exactly need expose to do an accounts receivable reconciliation or fill out a goods received note yet _these are the things that most computer users do in most companies_.
Once you take user preference out of the equation what genuine benefits does Apple really offer? Linux offers commodity hardware sourcing plus no software overhead. Windows offers the same hardware advantage and conformity with the rest of the market. After you amortize setting up a standard, well locked down image over 10k+ users are the costs of that really different enough to be significant?
What companies should be doing is deploying Macs where they could really have some benefit. I'm sure that there are some people who need access to things like FCP at work are suffering an old Windows XP box with inadequate tools. But for every 1 of those people there are 20,000 people who right now are tapping out yet another form debt collection letter and could do it just as easily from a $200 box running Linux.
Beep beep.
I think you missed reading the summary of the story as well as perhaps taking a glance at the story itself. Apple is not trying to compete in the corporate market.
You don't generate consumer buzz by talking about the things you're going to be releasing in, oh, five years or so. People forget about it and by the time it comes out it's already old news. Apple is much better off doing what they do now and letting the pressure of their consumer user base continue to help them in the work place.
Apple is growing. A few years ago the place where I work started offering Mac desktops and laptops for people who wanted those instead of a Dell. Judging from the amount of people I see walking into meetings with Macs I'd say that Apple has at least a 25% share at our business.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
If Mac, or Linux, is to succeed in the SMB market, an alternative to Intuit is needed.
Somewhat surprisingly, Intuit is very hostile to anything non-microsoft. The Mac version of quickbooks does not work very well. The online version of QB was specifically designed to not work with Linux. The enterprise version of QB is certified to run on certain linux distros, but that starts at $3000 USD, whereas the standard version of QB is $130 USD.
I am aware of the f/oss accounting apps, like gnucash, or ledgersmb, but none of those are adaquate for most SMBs. I think a viable alternative to QB would need a good sized company behind it.
Every company I was in (and that ranges from the very small to humongous worldwide behemoths) had a couple spares at the department level.
And you surely wouldn't store your critical data on one desktop?
...finally someone gets it. Yeah, there have been disasters like the ATI GPU in iBook G3 debacle, and the explodey battery debacle, but Dell has hardware disasters too and so does everyone else. Macs usually are built with the best parts that Apple can get their hands on. Everyone else cheaps out and you are left with leaky capacitors after a couple of years use or other crap like that. The only other company who has been really good on quality parts was IBM when they still designed and made ThinkPads and enterprise desktops. (not Aptiva or the i-series ThinkPads, you can blame Acer for that) Lenovo has taken the brand and dragged it down to the same crappy level as everyone else (Used a Lenovo ThinkPad lately? PU!) but mas o menos Apple has kept the brand up. I've had a very happy MacBook since 2006...finest computer I've ever owned.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
While eye candy is not necessary, I suppose, that doesn't mean it doesn't serve a productive purpose. For hardcore multitaskers, expose is a must - in a second you can pick the window you want out of the 20 that you have open.
But the thing that most often gets ignored in geek circles is the bling factor. We can't mathematically quantify any use for it, so we assume its useless and frown upon the simpleminded advocates of eye candy. Truth is, we're humans. We have an artistic side, and when our desktop interface is beautiful to use we're happier when we use it. I get more done when I'm in a good mood, and I'm in a better mood when my interface is entertaining and beautiful.
Necessary? No, but it enhances productivity. So it's only necessary if you want optimal productivity.
Not surprising that the computers most artists and musicians use sort of pioneered this.