The spread of Intel Macs may help this process along: first one uses more Macs, with Parallels to run the unusual Windows-only stuff. Then one increasingly focuses on cross-platform programs, and, over time, the corporation slowly moves away from Windows because they have more alternative operating systems. When Macs hit a critical mass almost no one will write Windows-only software.
In the bigger software world, that tipping point has practically already been reached for consumer software (i.e. Skype, etc.) with the exception of games. Although I think this unlikely to happen in the enterprise world for other reasons, stranger things have.
It would be nice if Apple did provide more corporate support, but for whatever reason they choose not to; see my earlier post on the subject, as well as its grandparent responses to some of the highly modded but poorly reasoned parent responses.
Remember that Microsoft once held a chunk of Apple, and there may well have been contractual elements to the divestiture of MS's stake.
And Microsoft sold that chunk a long time ago for a reasonably hefty profit. It has nothing to do with whether or not "deals behind the scenes" concerning corporations. Apple's corporate problems -- or lack thereof, as they don't seem all that interested in enterprise computing -- are almost entirely self-inflicted, much like their problems in the mid- to late-90's.
The mini doesn't address all the software/support problems discussed in in my earlier post.
[...] competively priced [...] (sic)
This is insane. The base mini is $600 without a mouse, keyboard, or monitor. Adding those peripherals from Apple brings it closer to $1200. Adding the mouse/keyboard from Apple and a sensibly priced monitor from Dell still brings it up to $800 - $1000. Adding enough RAM to make it usable raises the price further still. Even then it's hobbled by a 2.5" laptop HD that doesn't performs much worse than a standard 3.5" desktop drive.
Read the rest of that thread to see why the mini is basically there for niche users or to encourage an upsell to the iMacs.
Still, the mini does make Apple a little bit more competitive, but it's far from perfect for enterprise desktops.
The complaints in your post are certainly true, but the painful thing is that Apple could have made great strides in this department if it wanted to. For whatever reason -- my favorite guess is "the whims of Steve Jobs" -- Apple chooses to ignore the enterprise market, even though there are numerous relatively minor changes that could make them more plausible. See my post here for some of the more common complaints.
I'm also a Mac fan, but there a number of significant problems Apple still hasn't addressed; you can read about some of them in this post, which I wrote, as well as one of the grand children I posted in response to a highly modded but specious reply.
They do have an enterprise sales division that still doesn't do most of the things I'm describing and only *really* works well if you're deploying thousands of Macs at once. If you buy even a dozen a month, they're not much use.
I'm also not sure your generalizations fly. From the board I read -- Ars Technica's -- most people who *do* actually manage Macs in large environments haven't seen much Improvement. See, e.g., here and here and here and here for a variety of threads discussing the issue. Every time OS X.n+1 is about to arrive, so do threads wondering if this is the time for OS X in the enterprise. Look in particular for the posts of a guy named dhaveconfig, who manages a uni setup in Australia and is well-versed in Apple's various enterprise failings.
you get dedicated Apple representatives for your account. Onsite service contracts are available for server systems. Apple has always had self-servicing programs for enterprises, although the investment in spares can be a bit high.
This is true, but you STILL have to jump through Apple's hoops and you STILL don't get many of the things I cited in my original post. To be sure, Apple is looking better in the enterprise than they have in the past, but that's more an accident than anything else, and more a result of dividends from their other strategies. And "better" in this circumstance just means, "not as abysmal as they used to be," which is hardly an accolade.
You can't get enterprise level support. I.e. next day overnight shipping for parts, 24-hour tech high-level support, etc. Getting a damn power supply should be easily done online a la the stuff Dell and HP offer. Speaking of that, it's also damn near impossible to get an online system apart from the basic Apple store.
No xMac. The Mini helps in this regard, but Apple still doesn't offer a basic tower.
Exchange client/server. It's not good enough until it's perfect.
Uncertainty regarding OS X and hardware. The enterprise doesn't like not knowing what Steve Jobs is going to pull out of his hat in six weeks when you need new hardware today.
The first point is probably the most important, and the article doesn't really address how things have changed. Ever since 10.1 people have speculated Apple is finally pushing into the enterprise... maybe this time it will be. I'm skeptical given Apple's past intransigence. And I'm posting from a PowerBook.
The NTP doesn't give Iran to secretly enrich uranium to weapons grade or attempt to produce plutonium, which is the problem that's currently being dealt with.
If we took all the fulminating from Maclots like me about what trash Windows is, we'd probably assume that no one save an idiot would use it. And yet Windows is still the behemoth with more than 90% of the computer market. Judging what Dell's customers want from what those sufficiently energized and invested say on a website isn't perfect.
Many of Dell's customers may very well want Linux. But you can't generalize from this survey to all of Dell's market is foolhardy.
You're not the first person to make this request. If you want to read an inordinate amount of commentary and contention on the issue, look at this thread at the Ars Mac forum. Yes, I realize that it's like asking for a piece of chocolate and being dumped in the vat where it's made, but there's a lot of information and speculation there.
I'd buy more than the handful of tracks I have online if there weren't DRM. It would save me the hassle of buying CDs from Amazon or used record shops.
I just did what I swore I would never do. I had to purchase a replacement laptop for my stepson, but it was impossible to find a decent one (decently fast with 1G of RAM or greater) that came without Vista, and all but impossible to find any that didn't come with a microsoft OS. I walked into best buy after trying 5 or 6 stores - only one place would sell me an Ubuntu laptop and theirs was an average of $2K, way out of my budget! I called many places and drove around to a number of stores. Future shop had a big vista banner hung outside their store.
I'm probably not the first one to point out the obvious, but you must not have looked very hard.
Moore's Law originally stated that the transistor count on chips will double every 24 months, although it was later refined to 18. It isn't even really a "law" in the sense of, say, gravity; it's just an observation. What it has to do with the rest of your post isn't clear.
3.The alternatives are hardly tenable at this point:
a. Mass transport: Due to the size, shape, and demographic dispersion it is untenable for the majority of American metropolis'.
b. Buy everyone new electric cars. For one, manufacturing all those new cars just uses more energy and produces more emissions. So people proposing that are asinine at best.
[...etc...]
This is actually a relatively easy problem to solve, or at least improve, and many Republicans even agree with the solution: Pigou taxes. To explain simply, this means imposing a tax on gas or oil because the negative externality oil imposes in both environmental and foreign policy terms. When the price of something goes up, the consumption of it goes down; such a tax would certainly improve the situation WRT a-c, although d and e might require other solutions.
It's a fairly neat policy that requires no convoluted, mangled regulations; it could replace broken CAFE standards that drove people to SUVs in the first place; it also has the benefit of denying oil revenues to despotic regimes in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Russia.
I looked on your website for an e-mail link and didn't find one, so I'm posting here; you may want to read Posner's recent post on the subject of DUIs and drunk driving laws.
I'd also recommend an obvious e-mail link on your site.
You're probably also using properly cooled desktop and server drives. In my experience, those drives usually do outlive their usefulness, but laptop drives are a much different beast. The nature of constant moves, poor heat dissipation, and crammed electronics -- all of which are interrelated -- tend to make laptop drives more likely to fail.
Specifically, the news showed up here and here. The latter blog refers to the former, and both are written by actual Microsoft developers. Note the August posting date.
Then you've evidently grown up ignorant as well as jaded: there is not one bit of evidence that the CIA has ever imported cocaine. It's an urban legend that got started around the time of the Oliver North scandal. Stop repeating myths and focus on the kernel of truth, which is that no one trusts the government anymore. This is bound up with Vietnam and Watergate, rather than some fantastical tale about the CIA and drugs.
To continue along these lines, it's also important to remember that intellectual industries like IT or nursing can't instantaneously gain more workers. Workers take a long time to learn, and as such, there's always a disconnect between supply and demand. So it is possible to have a shortage until the market catches up; throughout the mid- to late 1990s, there probably was a shortage of IT workers in the U.S.
The other thing to bear in mind is that relatively few people have the combination of intelligence and personality for IT work. As a result, it is possible that there will be a worldwide IT shortage because unlike, say, stamping license plates, not everyone can be in IT. The threshold for IT is much higher than for license plates.
Now, it's possible that the grandparent is right, and employers are just annoyed at having to pay higher prices. But to say that there cannot be a shortage is inaccurate.
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In the bigger software world, that tipping point has practically already been reached for consumer software (i.e. Skype, etc.) with the exception of games. Although I think this unlikely to happen in the enterprise world for other reasons, stranger things have.
Remember that Microsoft once held a chunk of Apple, and there may well have been contractual elements to the divestiture of MS's stake.
And Microsoft sold that chunk a long time ago for a reasonably hefty profit. It has nothing to do with whether or not "deals behind the scenes" concerning corporations. Apple's corporate problems -- or lack thereof, as they don't seem all that interested in enterprise computing -- are almost entirely self-inflicted, much like their problems in the mid- to late-90's.
[...] competively priced [...] (sic)
This is insane. The base mini is $600 without a mouse, keyboard, or monitor. Adding those peripherals from Apple brings it closer to $1200. Adding the mouse/keyboard from Apple and a sensibly priced monitor from Dell still brings it up to $800 - $1000. Adding enough RAM to make it usable raises the price further still. Even then it's hobbled by a 2.5" laptop HD that doesn't performs much worse than a standard 3.5" desktop drive.
Read the rest of that thread to see why the mini is basically there for niche users or to encourage an upsell to the iMacs.
Still, the mini does make Apple a little bit more competitive, but it's far from perfect for enterprise desktops.
The complaints in your post are certainly true, but the painful thing is that Apple could have made great strides in this department if it wanted to. For whatever reason -- my favorite guess is "the whims of Steve Jobs" -- Apple chooses to ignore the enterprise market, even though there are numerous relatively minor changes that could make them more plausible. See my post here for some of the more common complaints.
I'm also a Mac fan, but there a number of significant problems Apple still hasn't addressed; you can read about some of them in this post, which I wrote, as well as one of the grand children I posted in response to a highly modded but specious reply.
I'm also not sure your generalizations fly. From the board I read -- Ars Technica's -- most people who *do* actually manage Macs in large environments haven't seen much Improvement. See, e.g., here and here and here and here for a variety of threads discussing the issue. Every time OS X.n+1 is about to arrive, so do threads wondering if this is the time for OS X in the enterprise. Look in particular for the posts of a guy named dhaveconfig, who manages a uni setup in Australia and is well-versed in Apple's various enterprise failings.
you get dedicated Apple representatives for your account. Onsite service contracts are available for server systems. Apple has always had self-servicing programs for enterprises, although the investment in spares can be a bit high.
This is true, but you STILL have to jump through Apple's hoops and you STILL don't get many of the things I cited in my original post. To be sure, Apple is looking better in the enterprise than they have in the past, but that's more an accident than anything else, and more a result of dividends from their other strategies. And "better" in this circumstance just means, "not as abysmal as they used to be," which is hardly an accolade.
You can't get enterprise level support. I.e. next day overnight shipping for parts, 24-hour tech high-level support, etc. Getting a damn power supply should be easily done online a la the stuff Dell and HP offer. Speaking of that, it's also damn near impossible to get an online system apart from the basic Apple store.
No xMac. The Mini helps in this regard, but Apple still doesn't offer a basic tower.
Exchange client/server. It's not good enough until it's perfect.
Uncertainty regarding OS X and hardware. The enterprise doesn't like not knowing what Steve Jobs is going to pull out of his hat in six weeks when you need new hardware today.
The first point is probably the most important, and the article doesn't really address how things have changed. Ever since 10.1 people have speculated Apple is finally pushing into the enterprise... maybe this time it will be. I'm skeptical given Apple's past intransigence. And I'm posting from a PowerBook.
Israel was never a signatory.
The NTP doesn't give Iran to secretly enrich uranium to weapons grade or attempt to produce plutonium, which is the problem that's currently being dealt with.
On a tangential note, Israel has also never threatened to wipe Iran off the map, despite its obvious capability to do so.
It is a nice building -- the occupant is the problem.
Many of Dell's customers may very well want Linux. But you can't generalize from this survey to all of Dell's market is foolhardy.
You're not the first person to make this request. If you want to read an inordinate amount of commentary and contention on the issue, look at this thread at the Ars Mac forum. Yes, I realize that it's like asking for a piece of chocolate and being dumped in the vat where it's made, but there's a lot of information and speculation there.
I'd buy more than the handful of tracks I have online if there weren't DRM. It would save me the hassle of buying CDs from Amazon or used record shops.
I'm probably not the first one to point out the obvious, but you must not have looked very hard.
Moore's Law originally stated that the transistor count on chips will double every 24 months, although it was later refined to 18. It isn't even really a "law" in the sense of, say, gravity; it's just an observation. What it has to do with the rest of your post isn't clear.
a. Mass transport: Due to the size, shape, and demographic dispersion it is untenable for the majority of American metropolis'.
b. Buy everyone new electric cars. For one, manufacturing all those new cars just uses more energy and produces more emissions. So people proposing that are asinine at best.
[...etc...]
This is actually a relatively easy problem to solve, or at least improve, and many Republicans even agree with the solution: Pigou taxes. To explain simply, this means imposing a tax on gas or oil because the negative externality oil imposes in both environmental and foreign policy terms. When the price of something goes up, the consumption of it goes down; such a tax would certainly improve the situation WRT a-c, although d and e might require other solutions.
It's a fairly neat policy that requires no convoluted, mangled regulations; it could replace broken CAFE standards that drove people to SUVs in the first place; it also has the benefit of denying oil revenues to despotic regimes in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Russia.
I'd also recommend an obvious e-mail link on your site.
You read /., and therefore we already know this.
You're probably also using properly cooled desktop and server drives. In my experience, those drives usually do outlive their usefulness, but laptop drives are a much different beast. The nature of constant moves, poor heat dissipation, and crammed electronics -- all of which are interrelated -- tend to make laptop drives more likely to fail.
Specifically, the news showed up here and here. The latter blog refers to the former, and both are written by actual Microsoft developers. Note the August posting date.
The numerous other music stores, including Sony's, Wal-Mart's, Real's, and whoever else opened one this week.
The Zune. (Insert joke here.)
The status quo.
Learn how to write coherently in your language of choice and how to avoid sentence fragments.
Then you've evidently grown up ignorant as well as jaded: there is not one bit of evidence that the CIA has ever imported cocaine. It's an urban legend that got started around the time of the Oliver North scandal. Stop repeating myths and focus on the kernel of truth, which is that no one trusts the government anymore. This is bound up with Vietnam and Watergate, rather than some fantastical tale about the CIA and drugs.
Before spouting off on this thread, you may want to read this article from The New Yorker about what political scientists think about voting behavior.
The other thing to bear in mind is that relatively few people have the combination of intelligence and personality for IT work. As a result, it is possible that there will be a worldwide IT shortage because unlike, say, stamping license plates, not everyone can be in IT. The threshold for IT is much higher than for license plates.
Now, it's possible that the grandparent is right, and employers are just annoyed at having to pay higher prices. But to say that there cannot be a shortage is inaccurate.
Best for what? If OS X is the best UNIX you've ever used for, say, database hosting, then it's probably the only UNIX you've ever used.