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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."
Now if only Apple would get their shit together when it comes to their server products. Anyone who has had to administer OS X 10.5 Leopard Server knows that the entire release was a complete gong show. From crashing AFP and directory services, to a half-implemented calendaring solution, a laughably broken server administration GUI (I mean, who would want to mark reverse zones as transferable _anyway_), and countless other problems... Microsoft , Red Hat, SuSE and Ubuntu are just walking all over them when it comes to the server offering.
Sure the Apple stuff is integrated and works for the basic case. However, if you try to move past what is written in the sparse user manual, you not only lose support for your basic "AppleCare" but also have to spend time figuring out how Apple has mangled the pieces of the open source offerings that hold their stuff together.
That all being said, I think with some work and polish the server side of things could really become a viable solution. It's just not quite there yet. This is coming from someone who administers these things for a living...
as touched on in the article, Apple is overly secretive on new upcoming things. This is not what companies want. I work in an IT department and I've seen what both IBM and sun have coming in the next few years. Its called a non-disclosure. This helps my bosses shape future purchasing requirements, because they know whats coming ahead of time, versus a big flashy presentation at a conference and it being available in afew days.
Apple has to realize if they want to compete, they need to open up a bit to their larger buyers. Yes, the consumer market is great, but now that users are becoming apple savvy, you want them to have the opportunity to bring it to their workplace. Its a similar thing happening with Linux. My bosses were very anti Linux, but the latest batch of graduates have so much experience with it, its being rolled into our environment. You get people using it at home/school and they will want it at work.
My consultancy is currently working with several support companies who are starting to change their offered product mix. You would simply not believe how slow it is as the culture has to change, the training has to take place, the systems have to evolve. In my view, Apple is right to stay out. Eventually the wheel will turn and the fashion will revert to in house support. Then they will be in with a chance.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I work at a MAJOR cable television network, based in Atlanta, with branch offices all over the country and about to be global. Our in-house Mac inventory has only been steadily increasing over the last few years and is expected to go even higher in the next budget. Whole departments are switching to MacBook Pros, en masse, and not just the "creatives". Even the engineering department is switching over to Mac, as most of their applications have OS X versions or they BootCamp/VMWare Windows if need be. Even Blackberries are being supplanted by iPhones, since the recent patch allowing Exchange integration and the next version of the device being fully Exchange compatible (according to our Apple vendor).
From a support standpoint, the transition is a little rougher, as others here have noted, but the company is paying to have their support staff become Apple certified techs (myself included) in order to do the work in-house and keep our warranties intact.
The server side is also increasing, for the specific purpose of running the data ingest software used to manage clips for our HD transition.
Some of us have even messed around with the hacked OS X kernals floating around and I can report that it runs BEAUTIFULLY on a Dell GX520. If companies like Psystar are indeed a harbinger of things to come, I see Apple's market share in the corporate environment only continuing to rise.
My company bought a white Macbook for me about 6 weeks ago, it arrived with broken internal speakers. The nice kids at the Mac store ordered the parts and said to bring the machine in for a quick fix. Being all cool and slack, the Apple store does not take appointments, so I brought the machine in last nite to see if they could fix it. The nice technician told me it would take 1-2 days and there was nothing to speed the process. This Macbook is my work machine, it's not for school or personal use - it's part of a (small, agile) global enterprise that runs 24/7 and I can't be without it for that long. HP and Dell send technicians onsite to service problems like this, no questions asked. It's like pulling teeth to get repairs out of your people. Until you figure out how to fit into business customer's needs, you will self-limit your reach.
Of the 4 new Macs I've worked on in the past year, 1 Macbook, 3 silver towers, 3 of the machines had hardware problems out of the box or within 1 week of unpacking. Specifically the broken speakers and dead Firewire ports. FIX YOUR QA PROBLEMS, CUPERTINO.
In the meantime I will be recommending HP, Lenovo or other for laptops and desktops.
Sincerely,
A Burned Customer.
PS - why is it called the "Genius Bar" if they are such idiots about these things?
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
We support 3 Macs out of 200 computers in our labs. We used to have a lab full of them, but nobody ever used it.
Apple's warranty service is execrable. We had one machine sit there broken waiting on a new motherboard for 6 months.
The replacement motherboard gave out last month (the extended warranty expired last year), and we had to take it down to the Apple store, because we can't just buy a replacement part like we could for a PC.
Macs are just fine for personal use, but Windows is far better in a lab environment. It's easier to administrate, reasonably easy to keep secure, and very easy to buy hardware and software for.
2. Reliability, both HW and SW. (See my earlier posting on HW experiences.)
3. NO fscking viruses, spyware, etc to worry about. (When there's a real threat -and- a counter shown to be -safe and effective-, I'll buy it. Until then, no point screwing up the machine with anti-virus software that doesn't protect against any serious threats...)
4. Expertise on the platform. I can use Windows, but I'm much better on the Mac for GUI-like things, and when I need to, there's always the Terminal for all the Unix commands I know. (And Aquamacs is my preferred text editor, a great Mac port of Emacs...)
5. Ease of customization. This is related to ease of use, but is worthy of a comment itself. I can set things up the way I want to, in part because of the Mac's support for doing so, and in part because the corporate IT Nazis don't understand them well enough to prevent me... Don't get me started on Corporate IT departments, whose primary goal it seems to be to make everyone else's jobs harder to make their jobs easier; the opposite of 'service'...
6. Software/Hardware investment. I have -a lot- of stuff for the Mac, both commercial and shareware. Duplicating that in Windows would cost more than the computer itself.
When I changed jobs, I told my new boss that I did not want to use Windows. He responded, "Look, you get what makes -you productive-. You're the one making money for the company, not corporate IT."
All this dates to before the Intel Mac and the rise of virtualization. I have -one- customer application that I'm required to run on Windows. I also have occasional problems opening supposedly compatible Microsoft documents created on Windows Office on the Mac (but NewOffice usually opens them when Mac Office crashes... Go figure!)
I still don't understand why IT departments pay $$$$ for Exchange Server when the Open Source/Open Standards alternatives are
(a) A LOT cheaper
(b) A LOT more reliable
dave