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Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has covered everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Besides his work with CNET, Don's work has been featured in a variety of other publications including PC World and a host of Ziff-Davis publications.
Don writes product reviews for InformationWeek and is a regular contributor to Processor Magazine. You can visit his personal site at DonReisinger.com or if you would like to email Don with questions or comments, drop him a line at CNETDigitalHome@gmail.com. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
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The decision is not going to come down to "what does the CEO or COO prefer". If he/she wants a Mac, he/she can HAVE a Mac for their own use. Does that mean throwing out all the old computers and replacing them with a Mac JUST because the person in charge likes them? Yes, college students will eventually be our IT guys and our CEO's and COO's and what have you, but it comes down to, after university education, will they all still be siding with Apple or will they "move on" to learn what their companies already use?
After all, I can't go to school and learn on a Mac when I know I'll be dropped in an industry using PC's.
http://training.apple.com/certification/macosx
http://training.apple.com/training/
Let's see it took about 5 seconds to Google Mac certification to find this.
Android is open source and is targeting who? Not consumers, that's for sure. How many consumer level Android "killer apps" have you seen at the forefront of their marketing campaign? None. They are very obviously going after the developers.
Apple has taken the "Nintendo Approach" by creating awesome first party applications. iTunes, Final Cut Pro (and express), iMovie, GaradgeBand, iDVD, iPhoto - all are excellent first party applications. But how many awesome Mac exclusive 3rd party titles are we seeing? Not many. Again, they need to target developers.
All of the shared apps run better on Vista. You cannot even get a 64-bit version of Pagemaker. Why? Because Apple is forcing their software partners to either stay 32-bit on the old UI, or make major re-writes for the new 64-bit UI. Adobe is so tightly coupled with the 32-bit UI that they may never move to 64-bits on the Mac. Windows is a completely different story; Microsoft has made it very easy to move to 64-bits.
Corporate customers use ISVs who will develop for whatever platform is prevalent in the market. That's Windows at the moment.
In the end its all price points. Apple may find its way in, but unless employees are buying their own equipment or Apple gives Enterprises Macs for $300-400 each it will never happen on a wide scale.
Media hype is just that, we have several Mac's here and I have as much trouble with them as I do the Dell's.
If someone knows how to use a Mac and its core applications (MS Word, Excel, Power Point are 3rd party, but still essential for any Mac/PC user), they should have no trouble taking jobs which use a PC. If these were IT admin positions, its been my experience that the Mac fluent typically have more knowledge because they are WinTel PC experts as well. As for enterprise software, which typically come down to the MS Office Suite, its available. The case that you have trouble with is when custom MS software is deployed. I think Windows 98 and Windows XP did a great job of building in backwards compatibility. Windows Vista has been a nightmare. We're talking deploying software for a corporate environment, and many of these tools were written for DOS and were later used in Windows 98/XP in compatibility modes. The software needs to be re-written for Vista OS (.NET runtime?), Mac OS, or *nix. In this case the company can make the jump to the Mac (if it made business sense).
What skills did your potential hires have for a Mac that didn't transfer over to PC?
How about using a right mouse button?
LOL. Nice comment, made me chuckle :-) The Mac OS has supported the right mouse button for a long time. I've never met a Mac fluent IT person that didn't use two mouse buttons. I've also never met a Mac IT person that didn't know anything about Windows. Linux guys are an odd breed, but they typically know more about Windows than windows exclusive IT people. Get an IT person that knows Mac OS, Linux, and Windows, and you've got yourself a golden Goose.
A few years ago, we were pretty unique with this policy but recently, we encounter more and more companies who don't want to be Microsoft centric anymore and purposefully hire people with non-MS skillsets.
This sort of thing happens in cycles. Many years ago, you had to have IBM M/F skills for tech jobs, then it was Lisp, then it was Unix/BSD, then MS-DOS/Windows, now the trend is gradually but steadily moving towards Unix/Posix again. It's like a pendulum that swings from one extreme point to the opposite extreme point. In IT those points are desktop centric on the one end and server centric on the other. The original server centric environment was mainframes with dumb terminals, it then gradually changed to desktops and now its gradually going back to servers. When the pendulum is on the server side, Unix skills are in higher demand.
Man...i thought with the current economical crisis, no one was hiring!
If Apple is serious about the enterprise market, it has to understand the enterprise mindset. That's more important than its products. Microsoft understands it. As long as Apple doesn't, end of story. Sorry, folks.
By your analogy, Yahoo mail has gained traction in the Alaskan state government....
You need to seperate what is supported by the company (which hence equate to them spending money on buying your stuff) and what some guy in marketing brings in on the sly to make his life easier (which the company spends $0 on).
Say what?! The purpose of Parallels is to run Windows in a Mac. How is that breaking the dependency on Windows? All you've done is add the cost and complexity of virtualization on an Apple instead of Virtualization on Windows or GNU/Linux or ESX Server.
- For personal use, I'd recommend using BootCamp. Boot into windows if you need windows, boot into the Mac OS if you need to use your Mac. My solution for personal use doesn't really work for a corporate environment.
- IF you've decided to move to a Mac OS only corporate environment, then Parallls is about your only choice. Expect to have some tech support to help out your employees. As I said in a previous post, "its been my experience that the Mac fluent typically have more knowledge because they are WinTel PC experts as well."
Who do you work for, so the rest of us can avoid bothering with such an uninnovative and closed-minded company? Personally, the kids who "had no PC knowledge" (your term) probably know more about computers than you do, by simple dint of having looked around and worked outside of the Windows bubble.
/P
What's your point?
I?ve not personally run the numbers but I would bet a Starbuck pumpkin spice latte that many enterprise customers could see a real cost savings with longer Apple hardware refresh cycles and utilizing Citrix instead of vmware to host the oddball windows applications.
Longer hardware refresh cycles are irrelevant to most of the big corporations. They hire/purchase their equipment & get it changed after x years or they amortise their PC purchases over x years. x is typically 3 years, btw. So, being able to last longer is not relevant, but up-front cost is. Put it this way, a desktop that costs $500 more might seem ok, but multiply that across 2000 staff & that's a $1 million increase in the budget. You better believe the CFO will ask why.
That's why Dell does so well with enterprises. They are cheap, & can be counted on to last 3 years, where they are also covered by warranty or some service agreement. After which, no one cares if they break.
Some say it's pretentious, I say it's business.
From an administrative point of view the trouble free nature of the Mac makes it a very economical choice beside the cheaply made PC's with their continuous need for anti viral protection, trips to the technician for replacements of motherboards or any of the myriad other things that go wrong, mostly I suspect because of what people do to them. It is noticeable, however that the Macs tend not to suffer the same degree of downtime.
Thus the cost of the Mac is largely the upfront cost of purchase. While previous PC's had lower initial purchase costs their maintenance costs over the life of the machine made them at least the same cost as the Macs if not more expensive. If I factor in downtime and lost work time those cheaper machines work out being very expensive.
The Mac infiltration is already underway in business and is likely to accelerate.
Because there's nothing to do on a Mac.
"... it is because the most creative individuals are creating incredibly creative things on their Apple products, the latest of which - the iPhone has rapidly become a productivity device for designers etc. "
Please give an example of something you can do with the Mac and iPhone that cannot be done with Vista and Windows Mobile 6?
The real reason you're seeing the switch is because you have an entrenched Mac culture and your students are being assimilated into the religion.
CHALLENGE: Show me ONE device that can do ALL of the following things way BETTER than the iPhone and I will switch:
10 features I NEED in another phone to switch away from my iPhone:
1) A better web browsing experience (with multi-touch and tabbed browsing)
2) A better music experience (web store, better pricing, song availability)
3) A better version of Pandora with album art, ect (because I use this instead of sat. radio)
4) A better Google Maps with GPS with free traffic updates
5) A better Email client with support for Yahoo, AOL, ect.
5) A better YouTube experience
6) A better portable movie watching experience (wide screen, movie content with options to buy / rent)
7) A better design, that is nicer, thinner, and looks well made (fits in my pocket).
8) A better user experience, and ease of use (Calling, MP3 Player, Internet Browser, Voicemail, setup and everyday use)
9) A better active development community which can easily sell me their applications, utilities and games.
10) Costs significantly less than the iPhone, and has lower cost monthly plan cost than iPhone.
You are quite right on those points.
BUT, all 10 of those have nothing to do with what corporations want in a smartphone for their staff. What they want is this:
a) Close integration with their mail server (which is almost likely to be Exchange)
Yes, this oversight has since been corrected by Apple, and it's mind-boggling that Andriod did not include this out of the box. Gmail is NOT the mail server of choice for your corporations
b) Ease of integration with company specific apps
This will be a big stumbling block for the adoption of the iPhone. These guys do NOT want to go through AppStore for their internal apps. Windows Mobile's flexibility in this regard is priceless.
c) 'No strings attached'
If my organisation has a long term contract with a non-AT&T carrrier (or any local carrier who doesn't have the iPhone), then iPhone won't even be considered. No gadget is considered so 'must-have' by corporations that they would go to the hassle of switching carriers. Oddly enough, this is also the reason some organisations who ARE with AT&T will not get the iPhone, since they 'might' switch carriers. Contradictory, I know, but the key point at the end of the day is flexibility.
BTW, for countries where you can get official unlocked phones, the cost of an unlocked iPhone is usually higher than the cost of competing WinMo & BB products.
And thus you declare yourself as a biased religous zealot, not an IT professional.
Incidentally, this is also the reason a lot of corporations refused to move to Vista; because all their old Windows 9x/XP apps will break.
Now, the trend though is for newer software to be developed on a server-client architecture (generally through the browser) across the corporate network. Among other things, it reduces the dependency on the desktop operating system. Some might then look at moving into non-Windows environment, such as Macs.
However, with the invested expertise of all these companies in managing Windows enviroments, and the on-going trend in outsourcing managed services to companies which have invested even more in Windows expertise, Microsoft has simply too much inertia in the corporate world. And that, more than the whim and fancies of any CxOs is what Microsoft is banking on.
Why would any organization pay for Mac machines to simply add VMWare/Fusion and a windows license, when they can just get a windows box from the beginning?
Apple has owned the k-12, and college market since I was in grade school 20 years ago, and that strategy hasn't worked...
For all it's market share, when 90% of workers go home, they check their stocks and email on a windows box.
I own a Mac and made the personal decision to put VM Ware on it for business use, but that is just me, not an IT Organization looking to serve thousands of users.
Mr. Reisinger, how do you think a new workstation is managed in an enterprise network? If I run an IT department, I would be looking at many things:
Active Directory integration (by the way, I rarely see this talked about in Apple vs. Microsoft rants!!) - this means Group Policy which is incredibly important for management and lockdown, printer and share publication, logon scripts and so on. MacOSX has flaky at best support for domain membership and mapping SMB shares and printers.
Exchange/Notes/GroupWise integration - And no, Entourage doesn't count as a substitute for Outlook
Unified Messaging support - see how many VOIP vendors have support for this for MacOSX
Systems Management - necessary for medium-to-large organizations, so SMS, Zenworks, Altiris etc.
I could go on.....
How do you think plonking 5,000 MacOSX machines into a corporate environment satisfies these needs? As has been said in other comments, executives can have whatever they want/ If they all want MacBook Airs then IT departments handle them separately as they've always done. So why pay more per workstation just to have something that can't be managed and won't run the applications that businesses need to run?
Rgds,
Simon
Here are just a few reasons that Apple will never break into the Enterprise.
-Legacy support. Vitalization is another piece of software that might or might not work, cost money to get to work, cost money to support, cost money to purchase, and most important something else that can go wrong. Down time is lost money and a major piece of middle ware that can go bad is a risk that most companies will avoid if possible.
Another part of the legacy support is Microsoft will actually support older products for years after they are replaced. You can still get Windows2000 support. Apple forgets its last version about 2 minutes after its new version and most companies don't like to replace working products every year or two but every 5 to 10 years. Apple just does not do this.
-Single Supplier. Most companies will not purchase products that lock them into a single supplier if there is an alternative that will give them several potential suppliers. If I have mission critical software running on a platform I want to know that I have some power over my suppliers instead of being over a barrel of the gun. I need a new computer and dell tries to gauge me, I can go to HP. If that program is on an Apple, I am at their mercy when it comes to pricing. This is the biggest reason not to go with Apple.
-Relationships. Most companies either deal directly with Dell or with a reseller like CDW and have a long standing relationship. Than of course there is the relationship with Microsoft who despite popular opinion is great to enterprises. Apple does not have this with anyone, they are actually known to burn bridges.
-Secrecy. Microsoft announces there long term plans in public, does large scale tech preview and beta testing. Apple does not do this. They do minimum beta testing to keep the surprise this will not fly in the enterprise market. Apple would have to change their whole corporate culture.
-Product and pricing. Apple does not make desktop computer that would live on a desk. The Mac Mini is an underpowered joke and the Mac Pros are overkill. They don't have a docking solution so a laptop replacement strategy will not work either. The pricing of a suitable apple for the desk is twice to three times that of a windows machine.
They also are missing so many backend solutions that it will take them a decade or more to even start to catch up with Window Server products. They have nothing in the class of Exchange, no SQL server and the list goes on.
For Apple to enter the enterprise they will have to be a vastly different company that what they are. And no amount of this is what I am used to will convince a CTO to deal with a switch over headache or a CFO taking that large of a hit on the bottom line.
- by thejimisrad October 22, 2008 7:31 PM PDT
- Another important factor I forgot to mention is the long term health of the company. This goes along with being a single supplier. Apple has had success under exactly one person and failure when he was not around. Jobs has not announced a successor, there is no likely candidate either. Apple is seen as a one man show and that one man is not exactly young either. And much of their success can be attributed to their marketing. I could not find figures on the amount they spend on marketing but an educated guess based on other companies with similar ad buys would put it close to or over a billion dollars so say about a third of that are just Mac ads that gives about a 300 million or so marketing budget for a whopping 5 percent market share. It cost apple a lot to get a single user to their platform not good for the long term. When the windows side spent a fraction of that and has over 90 percent of the market.
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