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GE to offer Macs to their 330,000 employees as it standardizes on iOS for mobile
MSPowerUser ^ | October 22, 2017 | By Surer

Posted on 10/26/2017 8:52:58 PM PDT by Swordmaker

We saw yesterday how Microsoft’s absence in mobile led to the removal of Surface tablets from Delta’s employee offerings, and today we have more evidence of the erosion of Microsoft’s dominance in the enterprise as companies increasingly work to simplify their platforms.

Industrial giant GE has announced a partnership with Apple to bring Predix, GE’s software platform for the Industrial Internet, to Apple’s iPhone smartphones and iPad tablets.

The new Predix-iOS software development kit will include tools that software developers can use to write industrial apps that will run on Apple’s iOS operating system.

The new partnership means that a wind turbine mechanic in Oklahoma and engineers in New York City can use their iPhones to collaborate on fixing a problem that normally would require a trip back to headquarters — by launching, say, Apple’s FaceTime video chat — and make real-time decisions with instant visuals.

“We are really taking these very complex industrial scenarios and bringing them together with the simplicity of the iOS experience,” explains Kevin Ichhpurani, GE Digital’s executive vice president and corporate officer who leads the unit’s ecosystem and channels.

As part of the partnership, GE will make iPhones and iPads the preferred mobile devices for their workers around the world.

GE will also be offering Apple’s Mac computers as an option for their 330,000 employees.

The Register, commenting on the news, notes that this follows the footsteps of IBM, who switched 100,000 employees to Macs and reported reduced total cost of ownership over a four-year period of $273 to $543 per Mac due to lower support costs.

In both cases the entry point for Apple has been their mobile offering, and the Reg’s Andrew Orlowski notes:

Microsoft can no longer offer the end-to-end proposition that served it so well, even if parts of the proposition were far from best-in-class. It owned the clients, and the developer stack, and a large part of the server tier. Now it doesn’t, and if the client base melts away, this doesn’t make Azure particularly compelling.

As Apple, who is currently a Top 15 enterprise vendors with $25 billion in annual revenue, becomes increasingly focussed on enterprise, due to the saturation of the consumer market and the great margins available there, Microsoft may be facing a challenge it is now very ill prepared for.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Computers/Internet
KEYWORDS: applepinglist; enterprise; ge; macsios

1 posted on 10/26/2017 8:52:58 PM PDT by Swordmaker
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To: Swordmaker

I wonder how many board members the two companies share?


2 posted on 10/26/2017 8:56:04 PM PDT by Vic S
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To: ~Kim4VRWC's~; 1234; 5thGenTexan; AbolishCSEU; Abundy; Action-America; acoulterfan; AFreeBird; ...
GE is switching to Apple and offering 330,000 employees a Mac instead of a PC as they standardize on iOS mobile devices. — PING!


GE Adopts Apple Gear As Corporate Standard
Ping!

The latest Apple/Mac/iOS Pings can be found by searching Keyword "ApplePingList" on FreeRepublic's Search.

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me

3 posted on 10/26/2017 8:58:18 PM PDT by Swordmaker (My pistol self-identifies as an iPad, so you must accept it in gun-free zones, you racist, bigot!)
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To: Vic S
I wonder how many board members the two companies share?

ZERO.

4 posted on 10/26/2017 9:00:08 PM PDT by Swordmaker (My pistol self-identifies as an iPad, so you must accept it in gun-free zones, you racist, bigot!)
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To: Vic S

“IBM, who switched...” Wow x 10. Holy paradigm shift, Batman. My father purchased an IBM 386 instead of a Mac SE in 1990, because the 386 was preferred by responsible scientists.


5 posted on 10/26/2017 9:16:11 PM PDT by Falconspeed ("Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others." Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94))
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To: Falconspeed
“IBM, who switched...” Wow x 10. Holy paradigm shift, Batman. My father purchased an IBM 386 instead of a Mac SE in 1990, because the 386 was preferred by responsible scientists.

That figure has actually changed. They had installed 100,000 by the end of 2016. It's over 200,000 now and they are installing 2000 per week.

As for "responsible scientists," that's changed too. Here is a photo of the Curiosity Lander team at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the day of the landing. . . look at their choice of computers. . . and yes, except for one guy in the foreground, they are by a vast majority using MacBooks running OS X.



It's actually a logical choice as the Apple computer is a fully functional UNIX™ machine capable of running far more software than any Windows computer. . . including all the Windows software.

6 posted on 10/26/2017 9:33:44 PM PDT by Swordmaker (My pistol self-identifies as an iPad, so you must accept it in gun-free zones, you racist, bigot!)
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To: Falconspeed
Re: “Holy paradigm shift, Batman.”

Normally, I would agree with you.

However, this news came out on Monday.

For the week, GE is down almost 10%.

Microsoft had a big earnings surprise today, and is up almost 4% on the week.

Microsoft earnings were especially impressive for Azure and Cloud Services.

My First Impression - Microsoft is staying competitive with Amazon, which is the number one Cloud computing company.

Second Impression - the market is not impressed with Predix, which is GE's proprietary Cloud platform.

7 posted on 10/26/2017 10:03:17 PM PDT by zeestephen
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To: Falconspeed
You Dad was right about the 386 based IBM (and HP) being strongly preferred for science and engineering. No none nada trivial technical software for Mac around 1990. In the early to mid 1980s we often wrote our own software and in my case using HP Basic (very efficient) and Fortran (could handle most any thing. In the mid- 80s, I was running process models on a then state of the art IBM tower using compiled Fortran that often took 60 min to run one case. Data input was a DOS text file created with Edlin. Output was a table of numbers. This table was manually typed into a Quattro Pro spreadsheet for additional crunching to give info needed to determine direction of the next case. Multiple cycles of this built up to determining optimum conditions used for running a field trial for a new product using one train at a multitrain petrochemical unit.

Late 80s laptops hit the tech world and I changed hats to the process control field. Went through a lot of laptops using them in the field but they were a game changer. Used it for data collection (raw data via RS232 to the computer was several hundred numbers per cycle and a 3.5 floppy disk would hold 4 to 8 hours of run time. Back in the office, would import all the data into Quattro Pro, graph things, pull out the key data groups then run statistics on them using the built in stats of the spreadsheet. Oh, the reason I went through a laptop every 12 months or so was abuse. Seems that they just don’t like being left outside in a production plant sitting on a concrete block with a tarp thrown over it for protection. I had fun with repair geeks over this and soon gave up on thinking about repair. Why spend $500 or more for repair for a computer that was already out of date after 1 year. Toss it and keep on truckin’!

8 posted on 10/26/2017 10:13:01 PM PDT by Hootowl99
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To: Falconspeed

Yeah, it was a different time. I remember someone asking me (in 1993 or ‘94) why I had bought a ‘toy computer.’ I had a Mac Powerbook. This was in the pre-Windows 95 era, when Windows/DOS was still incredibly user-unfriendly compared to Mac OS 6/7 (or whatever they were on at the time). I guess ‘pain-in-the-neck to use’ was considered the mark of a ‘serious’ computer back then.


9 posted on 10/26/2017 11:40:47 PM PDT by irishjuggler
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To: Swordmaker

One of my friends came to the Philippines, with a new IPhone 8+. The difference in the camera of the iPhone 6 and the Iphone 8+ was staggering. Sometimes the human eye can’t tell much of a difference. The 8+ camera is head and shoulders above the IPhone 6. There was a huge, VISIBLE difference.


10 posted on 10/27/2017 12:59:23 AM PDT by Mark17 (Genesis chapter 1 verse 1. In the beginning GOD....And the rest, as they say, is HIS-story)
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To: Swordmaker

“It’s actually a logical choice as the Apple computer is a fully functional UNIX™ machine capable of running far more software than any Windows computer. . . including all the Windows software.”

What Apple really should do is come out with “power user” machines including a tower type computer with consumer parts. Right now MacBook “Pros” are quite underpowered compared with the mobile workstations available from Dell, HP and Lenovo. Those machines include Xeons, ECC RAM, and pro level GPUs.

I’m cautiously optimistic about the forthcoming modular Mac Pros, and the iMac Pro. If executed well, they’re a start.

Apple is now the largest company in the world by market cap. It needs to get back to its roots by providing powerful machines for innovators. I’d sure like to see Tim Cook replaced by a technologist.


11 posted on 10/27/2017 3:41:00 AM PDT by PreciousLiberty (Make America Greater Than Ever!)
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To: Vic S

It surely didn’t originate with the troops in the trenches. Apple has floundered and they need a boost.


12 posted on 10/27/2017 4:50:24 AM PDT by ImJustAnotherOkie
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To: ImJustAnotherOkie
It surely didn’t originate with the troops in the trenches. Apple has floundered and they need a boost.

Actually, it did start in the trenches. The employees were demanding that GE, and before that IBM, give them Macs, because they were more productive on their Macs and had far less down time. IBM tried it and found they had huge savings on IT costs. . . in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

So sad, you are just wrong, again.

13 posted on 10/27/2017 2:02:35 PM PDT by Swordmaker (My pistol self-identifies as an iPad, so you must accept it in gun-free zones, you racist, bigot!)
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To: Swordmaker

I wish the company I work for would switch over. They have a contract with Dell, and I am so damn sick of the aggravating performance of Windows 10, Office, Enterprise and SharePoint. Mostly just little annoying things like it invariably switches open document/applications location from the monitor I had it opened in to another monitor every time the computer goes to sleep. Randomly. No particular pattern. I could go on an on. Total crap.


14 posted on 10/27/2017 2:04:15 PM PDT by big'ol_freeper (If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking - George S. Patton Jr)
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To: Swordmaker

You’re going to have to prove that.

A small minority of know-it-all loudmouths would be more accurate.


15 posted on 10/27/2017 2:11:40 PM PDT by ImJustAnotherOkie
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To: Swordmaker

No corporate entity should ever use Windows 10. It transmits to Microsoft file names. That is a major violation of intellectual property rights since many filenames comprise sensitive information.


16 posted on 10/27/2017 2:50:07 PM PDT by CodeToad (CWII is coming. Arm Up! They Are!)
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To: ImJustAnotherOkie
You’re going to have to prove that.

Sorry, I'm not going to even try to prove it to a know it all loud mouth such as you. You wouldn't believe it anyway.

The proof is in the pudding. . . GE and IBM, who both started from the same point of employee demand, are now switching over to Apple hardware because it is more economical and the employees are happy.

17 posted on 10/27/2017 9:37:42 PM PDT by Swordmaker (My pistol self-identifies as an iPad, so you must accept it in gun-free zones, you racist, bigot!)
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To: Hootowl99

“This table was manually typed into a Quattro Pro spreadsheet.” Very interesting. Amazing.


18 posted on 11/09/2017 4:15:29 PM PST by Falconspeed ("Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others." Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94))
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