Will Apple's Lion Roar For Business?

An anonymous reader writes "Apple has long had a troubled relationship with IT departments. Any creative professional will testify just how hard it can be to convince IT managers to allow the use of Macs in Windows-dominated environments. And, despite the fact that the Mac OS is now quite a well-behaved client on Windows LANs, Apple sometimes does little to help its own cause. The decision to release OS10.7, or Lion, for download only is hardly going to endear Apple to IT managers who need to conserve network resources. Most of all, IT departments would want to see the Mac OS offering full support for virtualization, on the desktop and on the server. There are rumors that Apple will, itself, run a virtualized version of Mac OS under VMware as part of its iCloud product. Allowing OS X to run as a guest on non-Apple servers, and even on the desktop under VDI, would bring enormous administrative benefits to companies using Macs."

Comments

True story

[Anonymous Coward]

One of my IT guys came in to ask what time I downloaded Lion on Wednesday. The time I downloaded the OS and the time a colleague downloaded it correlated with times our network traffic was pegged and he couldn't access the Internet.

Not gonna happen

[TWX]

Apple is a company that makes its money primarily through the sale of boutique computer and electronics equipment. Their equipment happens to need an OS. Sure, there are some higher end applications for video and music that have created a niche market, but at the moment they make their money on selling trendy computers and electronics to trendy people at trendy prices.

Enterprise IT is different. Computers stay in use until they're depreciated or until they're nonviable. IT departments aren't interested in upgrading, and do it in waves, usually skipping entire generations of hardware and OSes because they don't fit the support model. IT departments also don't like variation and work hard to buy literally one model of computer for as absolutely long as possible, again, skipping generations of machines until latching on to the next long-term purchase model. It's the ONLY way to make support over a large number of machines (sometimes as much as many as 5000 to a technician like where I work) even close to possible.

Apple continually pushes everyone to go get the latest and greatest every time a new iteration of a product comes out. Got that iPad six months ago? Come get the iPad 2! Got that Mac Book? Come get the Mac Book Pro! 10.5? That's ANCIENT! Come buy 10.7!

Apple's business plan is highly successful, but only in the market they've built for themselves. They have no interest in licensing their OS out to run on hardware not their own, and with their upgrade strategy, they can't make significant inroads into Enterprise IT.

Business IT pro don't want to investigate

[guruevi]

Apple has pretty good enterprise tools, directory support, image deployment. What I have noticed in my organization is that Windows admins simply don't want to investigate. We have an Apple rep (engineer) that gives free classes on anything we want and still the Windows admins complain Lion needs a 3rd party (expensive) full disk encryption, special programs to integrate with Active Directory and can't be imaged.

Re:Business IT pro don't want to investigate

[Xacid]

I was using Mac OSX for the past year in my enterprise environment and it wasn't too bad for a lot of things. But the things I *really* wanted out of it it didn't have. I really dig the multiple desktops and being able to switch by moving the cursor to a corner of the screen. REALLY nice for virtualization. VMware Fusion ran decently, but I didn't have beefy enough hardware to really run everything I wanted - I do desktop support fairly often and it's nice to have every OS we use ready to go so I can walk someone through the steps of something exactly or troubleshoot w/ that specific system. I was given a Mac Mini so that really pushed what it was capable of to a point. What I didn't like - lack of anything similar to a taskbar. I hate hate hate grouping things. It's one of the first things I disable in Windows. I couldn't find much in the way of customizing the dock to do what I wanted. I was really turned off when I looked up how other's dealt with that people in the forums were typically very rude/arrogant (more than I've seen in a lot of other places) pretty much accosting anyone who wanted something different than what Apple had fed them. I'm fine with default being what it is but I'd like to have the option to change away from that. Lack of IE/browser with Active X. Not Apple's fault by any means but still really annoying when you need to access sites that utilize ActiveX. I'm looking at you Microsoft Web Outlook. Update handling was very nice. Very user friendly. Major plus. Fairly stable overall for most users. I was the exception the rule but that was due to the virtualizing I was tryign to do. What I'd really want as an IT professional is to have the abilty to run OS X in VMWare for reasons I stated above - it enables me to support other machines types very easily - in this case the few Macs we have. I get they're a "hardware company" but hindering my ability to support others does them no favors in regards to gathering support from IT decision makers.

Well-behaved LAN client != Managed client

[TheNetAvenger]

Well-behaved LAN client != Managed client

Until OS X takes on or even implements active management of clients at even a fraction of the level Windows does, it will not be viable in corporate/enterprise enviornments.

With Active Directory and Windows management capabilties, Microsoft has always focused on enterprise/business customers and an increasingly seamless system. Windows client/server environments self maintain, and offer a vast number of features that it is impossible to even replicate on OS X.

The world is no longer just well-behaved clients that work well with file shares and printers, and hasn't been since the early 90s, when Novel didn't grasp this evolution either. The transition was first to application server technologies, then centralized technologies that allowed computing power to stay local and offer a lot of features to the users/client and yet behave with the ease of agnostic terminal computing.

Re:Well-behaved LAN client != Managed client

[ephraimX]

I manage about a hundred clients with OS X Server, and it covers pretty much everything I can think of. Can you describe what you can do with Windows client management that you can't do with OS X?

Re:they are a marketing company

[aclarke]

Apple is not (much of) a hardware MANUFACTURING company. However, I'm not sure how you can intelligently take the position that hardware does not make up a significant portion of the company's focus. Look at the hardware they design, have custom made, sell, support, and yes, market.

I wish people would accept that a company can be a hardware company, a software company, AND a company that takes design and marketing seriously.

Re:they are a marketing company

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple does their own design, they employ hardware engineers who design the circuits on their boards. FoxConn takes those designs and turns them into PCs. Other PC shops like Dell just send a list of requirements to FoxConn who designs in whatever is cheapest and yet meets specs. Apple outsourced the assembly labour, Dell outsourced both that and the engineering labour.

Re:When pigs fly...

[That's What She Said]

At least, one can dream about it.

Now that the XServe is dead and the only options are the Mini Server (no dual ethernet, to say the least) and the Mac Pro (takes too much space in the rack), I wish I could just get an HP or Dell server, install a minimum Linux system with a VM and run instances of Mac OS X Server in it.

About servers being pretty, I am not sure it's just like that. Apple likes to sell pretty stuff, but they like to make money out of them even more.