If you every want to kill a mac purchase, just specify need for Visio (flowcharts, diagrams, process charts), MS project and full access to an exchange server. Until the mac can check off all three, it's a long road to corporate acceptance. Running dual operating systems is a bad solution... multiple places to check email, corporate IM... plus twice the licensing cost for Office and whatever other applications.
Also if your company requires flawless documents for client work... opening a powerpoint document that done on the Mac never looks right when the client opens it on the PC.
And have you ever seen keynote used in a corporate environment?
I support a mixed environment of 50 PCs and 6 Macs. Overall, the cost of Mac support is much higher than that of the PCs. Once correctly configured (use group policies, don't run with administrator rights, lock down program/window directories, don't run crapware) PC require almost no care or feeding. The business-class Dells are reliable. The support costs for the Macs are much higher--imap problems, font problems, applications. Perhaps if locking down the macs was as easy as locking down the PC our support costs would be lower. But the Macs really are designed as "personal" machines rather than "corporate" machines. Not easy to lock things like the dock (why should an individual employee change this?), desk top, network connections or remotely push policies to a desktop machine.
FYI... protected mode is the default. You have to try pretty hard to disable it... Of course Adobe in their infinite wisdom requires you to turn off protected mode to be able to write PDF (using acrobat) from IE. More adobe's fault than anything else.
Without full support for exchange, this is a wanna-be server. The exchange, outlook integration is still way better than the ical approach. With exchange shared adressess books, shared calendars and really good email integration works. The apple server "sort of" supports imap and pop... and a couple of poor open-source web integration alternatives.
Exchange alone is a good enough reason to go with Windows servers (and yes, I know some people have difficulty setting up exchange.)
Have you tried getting "business class" support from apple as a medium business. Support to apple means waiting on hold to some indian guy who doesn't speak english. Then dragging your broken computer to an apple store and waiting in line behind some pierced dude who needs help with garage band, and then waiting in line behind someone's grandmother...
Where is the 4-hour on-site support, premium software service and all the other stuff of "real business machines".
Unless you have mostly apples, there really isn't any need for an apple server.
Even the sealed batteries in today's car aren't really sealed... If you lightly pry the cap up, you can still refill them. The electronics in cars have gotten better so the batteries are less likely to be overchanged, and thus need refilling less frequently. Hopefully at the 15,000 mile check-up, the battery level is being checked.
It's pretty easy for corporate IT managers to derail Mac purchases outside of creative and other special purpose applications.
First of all ask about integration with MS Project. Zippo. If you use Project for scheduling or project management you're completely out of luck on the mac.
Second ask about Visio. Same thing. No Visio or visio-compatible mac apps.
Third ask about Excel macros. If your company uses any moderately complex excel macros for budgeting, forecasting or modeling they probably don't work on the Mac. Same if your macros depend on integrating external data. Not on the Mac (at least not very easily). Ask about excel speed on mac.
And finally just point to any Mac ad and ask if this is the kind of applications we need in a coporate environment. When was the last time Joe in accounting or Sally in finance needed to author a tune at work with something like Garage Band. Or edit and print photos of their vacation with iPhoto? Same with the mac-on isight? Most of the mac applications just scream consumer. (Ok the PCs come with a couple of lame games...these just scream time wasters.)
Apple isn't close to a reasonable business machine.
Don't forget working with exchange. Exchange is pretty much the corporate standard...and while the web interface is ok, it's still a second-class citizen compared to the PC version.
Actually, a working IMAP client for the mac would be nice. The included apple mail client is broken for imap.
Apple seems to be particularly bad about inventorying spare parts. Spares allocated to repairs are "unproductive" assets. Everytime I've had anything break on a Mac I first have to go through the painful consumer-type customer service, then argue for at least 20 minutes that we have paid for on-site service. Finally, they indicate that the parts are back ordered and it might be week or more before we can get a replacement.
Maybe if it was some obscure part (xraid motherboard or old hardware) I could understand. But we got the same response when it was a standard MacPro diskdrive and on another occasion a power supply.
Basically I would say that apple support is NOT ACCEPTABLE for busines use.
One of our dell laptops had a screen go bad (lines were appearing on the screen). A 5 minute call (including hold times) with a customer rep confirmed the problem and scheduled the tech. The next day the part arrived in the morning and the tech arrived in the afternoon. It probably took him 20 minute to replace the screen. Total lost time less than a day.
The same event with an apple product would have required a minimum of 2 hours on the phone and probably a week or more of lost time. Apple=Stuff you use at home Major brand PC=Stuff you use at work.
But I find his story and credibility to be better than average for these reasons. If he wasn't credible at all, would we even be discussing it?
You must be new here.
The trivial (check)
Too much time on our hands (check)
Unsubstantiated rumors (check)
Friend of friend (ok co-worker) story (check)
Slamming Dell (check)
Slamming Microsoft (no check)
This story has everything except an anti-microsoft angle...if the dell were running linux the shocks would be a feature.
As he owns a computer shop, perhaps he's a biased source. He's trying to slam a competitor..."hey look this dell that you can buy is unsafe, or you could buy a reliable machine from me."
It's like pepsi saying that coke doesn't taste good (it may be true, but the source isn't reliable).
Perhaps if he would like to send me the "defective" dells I could inspect them. If they are are unsafe, I'd be willing (at great personal risk) to keep them so no innocent bystanders get hurt.
The apple equivalent would be to require you to insert your ipod in a sealed container and then drag it to the trash to eject it. I never understood why to delete a file you drag it to the trash, and to eject a cd you drag it to the trash. Seems counterintutitive to me...
Like the pc approach better...it just works... hit the eject button on the cd and out pops the cd.... if the application locked the cd drive then it doesn't eject. Why should I need a software command to eject a read-only cd or dvd?
That's like saying it ran windows, just not the latest version. Microsoft hasn't been charging $100 for each service pack... on the otherhand upgrading to the new OS is about $150. Apple is pretty pricy about charging for each bug fix/release.... and they stop supporting old releases after a year or so... Microsoft still supports many of its old releases even after 5 years....
Anyone have a daylight saving fix for OS 9? 10.0? 10.1? 10.2? How about OS 8?
Actually, recently I've had good experiences with Dell service. The calls are answered within 2 minutes by a native English speaker. They no longer torture you to reformat multiple times. The next-day service is almost always next day. Their model is that the call center diagnoses the problem and the repair guy just replaces the part. The repair guy should not have to do anything other than replace the part.
We have signed up for Gold service, which is probably an extra $50.
Recently I had an experience with one of our Apple PowerMacs. Failed hard drive--would not even reformat. After a long wait on hold, it took over over 2 hours to get them to agree that the drive was bad. That rep had a very minimal command of the English language, and was clearly not a native speaker. Although we have a next-day service contract the rep insisted that we carry the machine to an Apple store. No way, this is a business machine.
When we pointed out the next day service the rep agreed to send a repair guy. Next problem was that "there are no spare parts available" (wtf, no disk drives?). It took over a week to get a spare to the repair guy. Hopefully, he will show up on schedule.
Although Apple service has gone way down hill, Apple is still riding its positive reputation while Dell has improved dramatically it is still suffering from the negative reputation of a few years ago.
I can't see the iPhone (iFone?) being a huge hit in the corporate environment. It's pretty hard to justify a music player as a corporate expense (next for the expense account... a game boy and Xbox as "training tools").
It doesn't play well will corporate email (especially exchange) and doesn't (afaik) have remote wipe capability.
There's probably a big consumer and executive (got-to-have-it) market for it, but for the drones (who run up the big airtime bills) it's not the right product.
The general comments seem to be that we hate Microsoft because it's a closed system. On the otherhand we love Apple because everything works so well together. Apple has a real advantage having locked users into the hardware. They can develop for a very narrow selection of hardware and have minimized the support costs. The comments above about the stuff that MS users are force to use... can be countered with the stuff that isn't available for Mac users.
There is a very narrow range of hardware choices...for desktops you have the low-end iMacs and minis (limited memory, limited choice of drives) and nothing until you hit the high-end. MacPros- wide choice of drives and memory options, but very pricy.
The windows world gives a much wider range of hardware--without the lock in.
Also the choice of software for the mac is relatively limited...there is usually just one option (or maybe two) in each major category. For example, there is one home finance program, one tax program...and if you are looking for special interest programs, in many cases there are none available for the mac. If all you want to do on your computer is email and web surf either platform is fine.... if your needs are more specialized there generally are more choice for the PC.
What categories of programs are Mac only? I think in the creative area (Adobe, Photoshop, Quark) they are all cross-platform. Mac does have a unique high-end movie editor (but apple had to write it as no commercial company saw a big enough market in a mac only (yes, Adobe is returning to cross-platform for their version).
All the mac fanboys are busy trashing vista and how long have they used Vista? Have they even booted up a machine with Vista or are they just quoting the usually line about microsoft. I've used the mac for more than 5 minutes... and find the UI unintuitive... can't say anything about vista until I try it.
Actually there is a really interesting article on the Office blog about why the personalized (dynamic) menus and clippy didn't work. The UI design and testing that went into Office is impressive...and shows the care that went into the development of the UI.
The problem with PDF is that it isn't an editable format. If you're doing a collaborative document (or even just joint editing) PDF doesn't work. I can be pretty certain if I send a client a Word document that they will be able to open it and not get any strange formatting/messages.
You know when a consultant sends you a PDF that they are just fee burning for each edit.
Fixing colors in excel is a great thing.... The 64 colors was a pain... especially if you are trying to produce "reports" from excel. If you're a pro at excel, it's just a wonderful program for doing almost any kind of quick analysis and reporting.
The other problem with switching is compatiblity. OO is close to compatible, but if you're in business that depends on perfect formatting...close doesn't cut it. Bullets change fonts, line breaks change, pages don't quite fit and tables just get screwed up.
If you depend of excel macros (a really great feature) you're completely out of luck. And there isn't a good OO equivalent to PPT...once you've bought PPT, the whole suite isn't much more.
OO is find for internal use or writing a letter to mon, but not acceptable in consultanting or other business that earn their living selling words or ideas.
Depending on how you purchased or use office there are a couple of upgrade options. For student (K-12) and teachers you can by the student/teacher version at a significant discount. Downside is it is for non-commercial use and cannot be upgraded at a discount.
Buying a new machine with office is another option (if you're in a hardware upgrade cycle). MS Office Small Biz (word, PPT, excel, publisher, outlook) is about $200 (depending on your pricing level, contract, machine).
The other question about an upgrade is the value of your time...if you can save half a day with the upgrade it might justify it on that alone.
If you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel...no one NEEDs office (or a computer, or HD cable, or...).
Actually the file sizes are 50% (or so) smaller in the new version of excel. The ability to handle large files is a plus... many times a database would be more suitable than excel, but for one-off data analysis and manipulation excel is really powerful tool. I had a one time need for a 120,000 row by 100 column spreadsheet and excel didn't choke on it.
What was really amazing was the speed of pivot tables...even working on the full spreadsheets pivot tables were nearly instanteous even on a relatively old Pentium 4 (with 3 GB memory.)
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If you every want to kill a mac purchase, just specify need for Visio (flowcharts, diagrams, process charts), MS project and full access to an exchange server. Until the mac can check off all three, it's a long road to corporate acceptance. Running dual operating systems is a bad solution... multiple places to check email, corporate IM... plus twice the licensing cost for Office and whatever other applications.
Also if your company requires flawless documents for client work... opening a powerpoint document that done on the Mac never looks right when the client opens it on the PC.
And have you ever seen keynote used in a corporate environment?
I support a mixed environment of 50 PCs and 6 Macs. Overall, the cost of Mac support is much higher than that of the PCs. Once correctly configured (use group policies, don't run with administrator rights, lock down program/window directories, don't run crapware) PC require almost no care or feeding. The business-class Dells are reliable. The support costs for the Macs are much higher--imap problems, font problems, applications. Perhaps if locking down the macs was as easy as locking down the PC our support costs would be lower. But the Macs really are designed as "personal" machines rather than "corporate" machines. Not easy to lock things like the dock (why should an individual employee change this?), desk top, network connections or remotely push policies to a desktop machine.
FYI... protected mode is the default. You have to try pretty hard to disable it... Of course Adobe in their infinite wisdom requires you to turn off protected mode to be able to write PDF (using acrobat) from IE. More adobe's fault than anything else.
Without full support for exchange, this is a wanna-be server. The exchange, outlook integration is still way better than the ical approach. With exchange shared adressess books, shared calendars and really good email integration works. The apple server "sort of" supports imap and pop... and a couple of poor open-source web integration alternatives.
Exchange alone is a good enough reason to go with Windows servers (and yes, I know some people have difficulty setting up exchange.)
Have you tried getting "business class" support from apple as a medium business. Support to apple means waiting on hold to some indian guy who doesn't speak english. Then dragging your broken computer to an apple store and waiting in line behind some pierced dude who needs help with garage band, and then waiting in line behind someone's grandmother...
Where is the 4-hour on-site support, premium software service and all the other stuff of "real business machines".
Unless you have mostly apples, there really isn't any need for an apple server.
Even the sealed batteries in today's car aren't really sealed... If you lightly pry the cap up, you can still refill them. The electronics in cars have gotten better so the batteries are less likely to be overchanged, and thus need refilling less frequently. Hopefully at the 15,000 mile check-up, the battery level is being checked.
Really don't know what the problem with apple mail is, but it is not recommended with EIMS (Eudora Internet Mail Server).
It's pretty easy for corporate IT managers to derail Mac purchases outside of creative and other special purpose applications.
First of all ask about integration with MS Project. Zippo. If you use Project for scheduling or project management you're completely out of luck on the mac.
Second ask about Visio. Same thing. No Visio or visio-compatible mac apps.
Third ask about Excel macros. If your company uses any moderately complex excel macros for budgeting, forecasting or modeling they probably don't work on the Mac. Same if your macros depend on integrating external data. Not on the Mac (at least not very easily). Ask about excel speed on mac.
And finally just point to any Mac ad and ask if this is the kind of applications we need in a coporate environment. When was the last time Joe in accounting or Sally in finance needed to author a tune at work with something like Garage Band. Or edit and print photos of their vacation with iPhoto? Same with the mac-on isight? Most of the mac applications just scream consumer. (Ok the PCs come with a couple of lame games...these just scream time wasters.)
Apple isn't close to a reasonable business machine.
Don't forget working with exchange. Exchange is pretty much the corporate standard...and while the web interface is ok, it's still a second-class citizen compared to the PC version.
Actually, a working IMAP client for the mac would be nice. The included apple mail client is broken for imap.
Apple seems to be particularly bad about inventorying spare parts. Spares allocated to repairs are "unproductive" assets. Everytime I've had anything break on a Mac I first have to go through the painful consumer-type customer service, then argue for at least 20 minutes that we have paid for on-site service. Finally, they indicate that the parts are back ordered and it might be week or more before we can get a replacement.
Maybe if it was some obscure part (xraid motherboard or old hardware) I could understand. But we got the same response when it was a standard MacPro diskdrive and on another occasion a power supply.
Basically I would say that apple support is NOT ACCEPTABLE for busines use.
One of our dell laptops had a screen go bad (lines were appearing on the screen). A 5 minute call (including hold times) with a customer rep confirmed the problem and scheduled the tech. The next day the part arrived in the morning and the tech arrived in the afternoon. It probably took him 20 minute to replace the screen. Total lost time less than a day.
The same event with an apple product would have required a minimum of 2 hours on the phone and probably a week or more of lost time.
Apple=Stuff you use at home
Major brand PC=Stuff you use at work.
But I find his story and credibility to be better than average for these reasons. If he wasn't credible at all, would we even be discussing it?
You must be new here.
The trivial (check)
Too much time on our hands (check)
Unsubstantiated rumors (check)
Friend of friend (ok co-worker) story (check)
Slamming Dell (check)
Slamming Microsoft (no check)
This story has everything except an anti-microsoft angle...if the dell were running linux the shocks would be a feature.
As he owns a computer shop, perhaps he's a biased source. He's trying to slam a competitor..."hey look this dell that you can buy is unsafe, or you could buy a reliable machine from me."
It's like pepsi saying that coke doesn't taste good (it may be true, but the source isn't reliable).
Perhaps if he would like to send me the "defective" dells I could inspect them. If they are are unsafe, I'd be willing (at great personal risk) to keep them so no innocent bystanders get hurt.
The apple equivalent would be to require you to insert your ipod in a sealed container and then drag it to the trash to eject it. I never understood why to delete a file you drag it to the trash, and to eject a cd you drag it to the trash. Seems counterintutitive to me...
Like the pc approach better...it just works... hit the eject button on the cd and out pops the cd.... if the application locked the cd drive then it doesn't eject. Why should I need a software command to eject a read-only cd or dvd?
That's like saying it ran windows, just not the latest version. Microsoft hasn't been charging $100 for each service pack... on the otherhand upgrading to the new OS is about $150. Apple is pretty pricy about charging for each bug fix/release.... and they stop supporting old releases after a year or so... Microsoft still supports many of its old releases even after 5 years....
Anyone have a daylight saving fix for OS 9? 10.0? 10.1? 10.2? How about OS 8?
Actually, recently I've had good experiences with Dell service. The calls are answered within 2 minutes by a native English speaker. They no longer torture you to reformat multiple times. The next-day service is almost always next day. Their model is that the call center diagnoses the problem and the repair guy just replaces the part. The repair guy should not have to do anything other than replace the part.
We have signed up for Gold service, which is probably an extra $50.
Recently I had an experience with one of our Apple PowerMacs. Failed hard drive--would not even reformat. After a long wait on hold, it took over over 2 hours to get them to agree that the drive was bad. That rep had a very minimal command of the English language, and was clearly not a native speaker. Although we have a next-day service contract the rep insisted that we carry the machine to an Apple store. No way, this is a business machine.
When we pointed out the next day service the rep agreed to send a repair guy. Next problem was that "there are no spare parts available" (wtf, no disk drives?). It took over a week to get a spare to the repair guy. Hopefully, he will show up on schedule.
Although Apple service has gone way down hill, Apple is still riding its positive reputation while Dell has improved dramatically it is still suffering from the negative reputation of a few years ago.
I can't see the iPhone (iFone?) being a huge hit in the corporate environment. It's pretty hard to justify a music player as a corporate expense (next for the expense account... a game boy and Xbox as "training tools").
It doesn't play well will corporate email (especially exchange) and doesn't (afaik) have remote wipe capability.
There's probably a big consumer and executive (got-to-have-it) market for it, but for the drones (who run up the big airtime bills) it's not the right product.
It will be a solid double, but not a home run.
The general comments seem to be that we hate Microsoft because it's a closed system. On the otherhand we love Apple because everything works so well together. Apple has a real advantage having locked users into the hardware. They can develop for a very narrow selection of hardware and have minimized the support costs. The comments above about the stuff that MS users are force to use... can be countered with the stuff that isn't available for Mac users.
There is a very narrow range of hardware choices...for desktops you have the low-end iMacs and minis (limited memory, limited choice of drives) and nothing until you hit the high-end. MacPros- wide choice of drives and memory options, but very pricy.
The windows world gives a much wider range of hardware--without the lock in.
Also the choice of software for the mac is relatively limited...there is usually just one option (or maybe two) in each major category. For example, there is one home finance program, one tax program...and if you are looking for special interest programs, in many cases there are none available for the mac. If all you want to do on your computer is email and web surf either platform is fine.... if your needs are more specialized there generally are more choice for the PC.
What categories of programs are Mac only? I think in the creative area (Adobe, Photoshop, Quark) they are all cross-platform. Mac does have a unique high-end movie editor (but apple had to write it as no commercial company saw a big enough market in a mac only (yes, Adobe is returning to cross-platform for their version).
All the mac fanboys are busy trashing vista and how long have they used Vista? Have they even booted up a machine with Vista or are they just quoting the usually line about microsoft. I've used the mac for more than 5 minutes ... and find the UI unintuitive ... can't say anything about vista until I try it.
Actually there is a really interesting article on the Office blog about why the personalized (dynamic) menus and clippy didn't work. The UI design and testing that went into Office is impressive...and shows the care that went into the development of the UI.
... the amount of effort in making them work for 8, 16 and 24 color plus high contast is impressive.
The whole development blog is interesting.
By the way, the icons are really gorgeous
The problem with PDF is that it isn't an editable format. If you're doing a collaborative document (or even just joint editing) PDF doesn't work. I can be pretty certain if I send a client a Word document that they will be able to open it and not get any strange formatting/messages.
You know when a consultant sends you a PDF that they are just fee burning for each edit.
Fixing colors in excel is a great thing.... The 64 colors was a pain... especially if you are trying to produce "reports" from excel. If you're a pro at excel, it's just a wonderful program for doing almost any kind of quick analysis and reporting.
The other problem with switching is compatiblity. OO is close to compatible, but if you're in business that depends on perfect formatting...close doesn't cut it. Bullets change fonts, line breaks change, pages don't quite fit and tables just get screwed up.
If you depend of excel macros (a really great feature) you're completely out of luck. And there isn't a good OO equivalent to PPT...once you've bought PPT, the whole suite isn't much more.
OO is find for internal use or writing a letter to mon, but not acceptable in consultanting or other business that earn their living selling words or ideas.
Depending on how you purchased or use office there are a couple of upgrade options. For student (K-12) and teachers you can by the student/teacher version at a significant discount. Downside is it is for non-commercial use and cannot be upgraded at a discount.
Buying a new machine with office is another option (if you're in a hardware upgrade cycle). MS Office Small Biz (word, PPT, excel, publisher, outlook) is about $200 (depending on your pricing level, contract, machine).
The other question about an upgrade is the value of your time...if you can save half a day with the upgrade it might justify it on that alone.
If you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel...no one NEEDs office (or a computer, or HD cable, or...).
Actually the file sizes are 50% (or so) smaller in the new version of excel. The ability to handle large files is a plus... many times a database would be more suitable than excel, but for one-off data analysis and manipulation excel is really powerful tool. I had a one time need for a 120,000 row by 100 column spreadsheet and excel didn't choke on it.
What was really amazing was the speed of pivot tables...even working on the full spreadsheets pivot tables were nearly instanteous even on a relatively old Pentium 4 (with 3 GB memory.)