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."

Comments

Repairing em'

[Hawkeye05]

I can't imagine what it would be like having to fight that shiny white plastic in able to swap out parts... No Thanks.

Re:Repairing em'

[v1]

Shiny white is relatively easy. When you get to the shiny black ones, there you have trouble. All the parts are behind the LCD panel, which is behind the display bezel, which is behind that really thin large sheet of glass.

(that's 21 screws, five cables, two suction cups, and 15 minutes to get past)

And care to imagine how difficult it can be to keep from getting a spec of lint between that glass and LCD panel when servicing it?

Re:Repairing em'

[multisync]

Not sure how you could do better than a day. We get next day from Dell, and we pay a lot for that coverage. Spend five minutes answering the usual questions (capacitors budging? LEDs flashing? Did you try turning it off and on again?), and the next day I receive either a power supply, a mother board or one a new drive via UPS. Return old part in same box and never give it another thought.

Blackberrys, OTOH, just get wiped and returned to RIM. I would think you would do that with a Mac, too. I wouldn't even know how to open one up, and if I did manage to get it open I'd feel the same way I feel when I look under the hood of any modern vehicle. Where's the damn carburetor?

So I guess the question for me would be does Mac offer a next day replacement service, and what does it cost? We'll leave aside for now what to do about the proprietary, Windows only software that our customer base compels us to use.

Re:Repairing em'

[michrech]

You must have a shitty contract, or a pissy attitude when you get the guy on the phone (if I worked tech support and got someone who was pissed off at the world, and taking it out on me, I'd make him wait too).

Where I work, we have a web page we can log into (Warranty Parts Direct), type in the ST, put in a description of what is wrong, any Dell Diag codes you might have, what you did to troubleshoot, select the part you want replaced, and submit. There's even a spot to select whether we want on-site support or not, though since they sub-contract that to a company in St. Joseph, MO, it's almost never next day. We only use this option for mainboard replacements in laptops. Everything else, we do ourselves, because it's quicker.

There is an online chat function so you can talk with one of the techs, plus there is an 800 number to call. I've never spent more than about 5 minutes on the phone with them (I rarely ever have to call in the first place).

5 minutes on the phone with Dell? Are you kidding? I've never been on the phone for less than 5 hours with Dell. They're insane.

I can tell them exactly what the issue is right away, and they'll still make me go through all the tests to prove that what I'm telling them is in fact the problem. We have 4 hour service from them, yet, that 4 hours doesn't count until after they acknowledge what the problem is, it's not 4 hours from when you say you have a problem.

Also, for servers that we have next day service on, they also like to make you wait on the phone just past their shipping deadline for the day, so that you don't actually get the parts until two days later.

Great for Entrepeneurs

[MyDixieWrecked]

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.

Re:Great for Entrepeneurs

[ColdWetDog]

It's not just for the hardware though. One of the bigger problems pointed out in TFA is that his Jobness just won't tell anyone where Apple is going. No roadmap (other than the cheesy map for the iPhone on the current Apple homepage). No ability to plan years ahead. Just do what Steve says.

Of course, it's not like Microsoft sticks to their roadmaps. But having a plan is comforting to Enterprise-types.

And yeah, they need to improve an OS X client to hook into a AD network. That should be relatively easy (even Microsoft did it).

APPLE HAS NO MID-RANGE HEAD LESS DESKTOPS!

[Joe The Dragon]

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.

Re:APPLE HAS NO MID-RANGE HEAD LESS DESKTOPS!

[eltonito]

I've been at a handful of Fortune 500 companies and my experience is exactly the opposite of yours. The desktop computer is dead, replaced by laptops which have lower TCO's and offer a better ROI. Apple would be wasting their time to build a mid-tower for this market as this market is small and getting much smaller.

What Apple really needs to compete in the corporate laptop market is a laptop dock. Most laptop users are sporting external monitors, mice, scanners, external storage and keyboards these days. Not having an easy way to hook and unhook all of that stuff twice a day is a deal killer.

Games moving off computers

[SuperKendall]

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.

Hard choice to justify

[Realistic_Dragon]

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.

Shouldn't be expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

If one desktop computer being down a whole day is very expensive, you might want to reconsider your business organisation.

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?

/and don't call me Shirley

Mac hardware usually superior, not inferior...

[MsGeek]

...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.