PBS columnist: IT hates Macs because 'Macs reduce IT head count'

PBS's I, Cringely, the pulpit via MacDailyNews ^ | August 15, 2003 | Robert X. Cringely

[Swordmaker]

"Why aren't Apple Macintosh computers more popular in large mainstream organizations? Whatever the gigahertz numbers say, Macintoshes are comparable in performance to Windows or Linux machines. Whatever the conventional wisdom or the Microsoft marketing message, Macs aren't dramatically more expensive to buy and on a Total Cost of Ownership basis they are probably cheaper. Nobody would argue that Macs are harder to use. Clearly, they are easier to use, especially on a network. So what's the problem? Why do Macs seem to exist only in media outfits," asks Robert X. Cringely for PBS?

Cringely writes, "Apple is clearly wondering the same thing because the company recently surveyed owners of their xServe 1U boxes asking what Apple could do to make them more attractive? For those who own xServes, they are darned attractive -- small, powerful, energy-efficient, easy to configure and manage, and offering dramatic savings for applications like streaming. Yet, Apple appears to be having a terrible time selling the things."

"I used to think it came down to nerd ego. Macs were easy to use, so they didn't get the respect of nerds who measured their testosterone levels by how fluently they could navigate a command line interface.  Now, I think differently. Now, I think Macs threaten the livelihood of IT staffs. If you recommend purchasing a computer that requires only half the support of the machine it is replacing, aren't you putting your job in danger? Exactly," writes Cringely. "Ideally, the IT department ought to recommend the best computer for the job, but more often than not, they recommend the best computer for the IT department's job."

Cringely writes, "Now another question: Why are Linux computers gaining in popularity with large organizations while Macs, which are based after all on BSD Unix, aren't? While there is certainly a lot to be said for Linux in competition with various flavors of Windows (Linux is faster, more memory-efficient, more secure, has more sources of supply, supports many more simultaneous users per box in a server environment, and is clearly cheaper to buy), the advantage over Macintosh computers is less clear."

"Again, it comes down to the IT Department Full Employment Act. Adopting Linux allows organizations to increase their IT efficiency without requiring the IT department to increase ITS efficiency. It takes just as many nerds to support 100 Linux boxes as 100 Windows boxes, yet Linux boxes are cheaper and can support more users. The organization is better off while the IT department is unscathed and unchallenged," Cringely writes.

"I am not claiming that every organization should throw out its PCs and replace them with Macs, but the numbers are pretty clear, and the fact that more Macs don't make it into server racks has to be based on something, and I think that something is CIO self-interest," writes Cringely. "Macs reduce IT head count while Linux probably increases IT head count, simple as that."

Amen.

[HAL9000]

and I didn't provide my industry for a reason. I'm skating very close to the edge on this.

I can appreciate the situation.

[avenir]

"I want to get a G5 too, but you're missing the point..."

Busted. I was indulging in the sport of Mac bashing, and you were making a point related to the thread.

[avenir]

"I guess this just demonstrates how provincial you are, huh?"

"Ah. Such is the life of a monk."

LOL! Maybe I'm just poor!

[HamiltonJay]

HAL,

Look arguing that Macs are better than PC's, more cost efficient or whatever is a DEAD argument. Every so often some author writes a Macs are godlike article, and the Mac fans jump all over it like moth to a flame. Its been going on since 1984 or so, and guess what, the business world is still Wintel.....

Apple lost the battle for the business PC 20 years ago, its not going to change. And no you don't make up the BILLIONS if not TRILLIONS of dollars in invested infrastructure and software etc by simply changing to a Mac... it doesn't work that way. And you don't have the same amount of proprietary hardware in a PC as a MAC... that is a flat out proposterous statement...

Say I want to put in a second video card in my Mac so that I can have 2 monitors displaying 2 different things at the same time... say one for me, and one for a presentation, or one for monitoring and 1 for my input... or say I want to hook up 6 different monitors to 1 Mac all showing different screens say for a monitoring wall in a MAC.. you are going to sit there and tell me I can go to the store down the corner pick up a few off the shelf cards, plug em in, get some drivers and boom its going to work? BE REAL!


Mac's are proprietary systems, and fight tooth and nail to keep any sort of clone or open architecture out as much as possible.

Companies won't phase out OUT OF DATE MAINFRAMES WITH CODE BASES THAT WERE WRITTEN IN 1980s for newer equipment provided it still does the job, and believe me lots of enterprises have lots of old systems with lots of old lines of code that NO ONE working in the company knows exactly what it does, and they aren't going to change those things, they sure as heck aren't going to retrain an entire workforce, replace thousands if not tens of thousands of computers and millions if not Billions of pieces of hardware just because some Mac fan says they can save money doing it.

You are truly living in dream world if you think switching an entire enterprise to a new hardware and software architecture is going to net any company any sort of ROI of any measureable significance, before the hardware is obsolete! Even if they could cut their IT staff in half (which they can't) it still won't counter the investment costs in 5 years! The argument that say PNCBank is would save money if they suddenly replaced every Windows PC in their organization with a Macintosh is laughable.

The sheere hardware replacement cost alone would make this rediculous, let alone the costs of the hundreds of thousands of pieces of software they own that run on that platform... and I don't care what emulator you have, believe me, there is a lot of custome code that is not going to run in any sort of effective way EMULATED.... Not to mention all the proprietary code and software an organization of that size has running doing various bits and pieces that would need to be redeveloped for the MAC OS... You are living in dream world, and have no idea of the costs or challenges of running enterprise IT.

You may have your feelings about your little desktop, but that one little node doesn't remotely represent the whole, and it is beyond naive to think it does.

Mac for business is a non starter... been hearing this stuff for decades, and its not going to change. I am personally glad MAC went to a Unix based OS... and they have some interesting things, but they are not at any time now or in the future going to be more than a home market/dorm room toy, with some minor footprints in some specialized areas... and never more than 10% or so of the entire PC market... that's reality.

I have machines that have been running SERVERS for YEARS without any downtime! And they run FreeBSD, but do I sit here and say hey, freeBSD should be the OS for the business world, because its free, Unix Based, and is open source and open architectured? No, I don't... I am glad you like your Mac I really am, but its dillusional to think that large enterprises are going to switch to MAC on any sort of scale for the desktop.

[RochesterFan]

Personally, I think IT should run only the servers and network. An individual PC is like an infantryman's rifle. If the infantryman can't take care of his rifle he is screwed. So it should be with laptops and individuals' desktop PCs.

I couldn't agree more. In this 'information age' the core competencies of a 'knowledge worker' must include the ability to keep a pc with essential apps running. I hate the 'let's keep them dumb and helpless' approach of most IT departments. I find it offensive.

[Phsstpok]

by the way, my comment "you don't do this" was not meant as a dig. Being a programmer, you don't do what I do, and that was my perception, though I didn't know you were a programmer when I got that impression from your comment. You can do anything you want on a Mac as well or better than on a Wintel box. I have to identify a platform that our 1,000 plus business locations in North America can go find whatever it is they need off the shelf without benefit of a competent programmer because we just ain't going to hire competent programmers. That gives me a very different perspective on what it is I'm trying to achieve.

Of course, I'm also one of the last hold outs that thought OS/2 was a good platform (it was IBM VM ported to the Intel hardware and I still insist it kicked butt (g))

[John Lenin]

I build my own IBM PC clones for under $400 and get 4 times the gigahertz for my money. Thats what I'm talking about, for a comparable Apple I have to go to the top of the line, usually in the $2500 to $3500 price range.

[Mr Crontab]

Maybe if you are in an office full of computer consultants.
Expecting an office full of ... say ... pediatricians to maintain their own computers is not very realistic.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

MTBF is meaningless when applied to such a small sample.

I think that's more or less what I said. You were the one who drew a conclusion (Mac more reliable than PC) based on two failures per year in a population of 10. (Sounds high to me, btw.) Accepting your data, one can conclude with moderate confidence that the Mac is probably not significantly less reliable than the PC, which is all I said. From the tone of your original post one might infer that you believed the Mac to be significantly more reliable than the PC.

My last Mac (RIP) was SCSI-based and in the last couple of years SCSI peripherals (including printers) became increasing scarce. And my last Mac OS (I "upgraded" to - I think - OS-X) was kinda buggy and ran slow on my Performa 6400CD. I'm sure a lot's changed since. When my last Mac was new - Performa 6400CD (120 MHz - G3(?) 64 MB RAM, OS-7) - it was clearly better in terms of user interface than my 90 MHz - Pentium, 32 MB, Windows 3.1 machine. And a lot more expensive.

I really do want Microsoft to have serious competition. (Hell, as long as it was American competitors, I'd want them dead.) Especially in terms of security. The security patch du jour approach gets old fast. But the Mac marketing strategy that I intersect with seems to be heavily weighted to the bells and whistles over substance.

Besides, if I were a CIO, I don't know if I'd gamble on going with a company that might not be there tomorrow. They used to say that nobody ever got fired for chosing IBM. (This was back in the 60's - '70's.) They might be pricey but their service was the best, they never left you stranded.

[Swordmaker]

Uh oh, a Mac geek comes out to defend his uni-button OS from the raving hordes of network people who like to make machines from parts and slap Unix-type OSes on them.

Ignorance is bliss, isn't it, Benrand?

Mac OSX IS Unix... and a particularly robust one at that.

In addition, my G4 has a three button, wheel track ball that works quite well, Thank you.

I am a cross platform computer consultant... I make one hell of a lot more calls to fix problems for my clients with PCs than I do for my clients with Macs. In fact, about the only reason I even SEE my Mac clients is to do routine updating of the OS because they don't want to be bothered with doing it themselves.

[Swordmaker]

Say I want to put in a second video card in my Mac so that I can have 2 monitors displaying 2 different things at the same time... say one for me, and one for a presentation, or one for monitoring and 1 for my input... or say I want to hook up 6 different monitors to 1 Mac all showing different screens say for a monitoring wall in a MAC.. you are going to sit there and tell me I can go to the store down the corner pick up a few off the shelf cards, plug em in, get some drivers and boom its going to work? BE REAL!

Yes. Every Mac since the 6360 PowerPC comes with industry standard PCI slots... one of the other PowerPCs, the 9000, had six PCI slots. Even some of the earliest Macs could do what you are describing, easily, with the software to drive it already built into the operating system.

The point being made is not that companies should shift to Macs in some massive move but rather that savings could be made by incrementally shifting as part of the normal replacement of equipment.

You display your ignorance of the Mac computer when you cling to the long abandoned proprietary peripherals and files myth... every Mac, built in the last six years, uses off the shelf Hard drives, CD, CDRW, DVD drives, memory, USB devices, Firewire devices, etc. Others who claim the need to "translate files" from PC formats to Mac formats are also completely out of date as the Mac can easily open all of the most used PC file formats. Microsoft Office for Mac OS X is a BETTER implementation of Office than Office XP... and files are identical. What's more, Appleworks will open Office files with no problem, so you don't even have to purchase MSOffice for Mac.

You know, the author of the article, Robert X. Cringely, is NOT a Mac fanatic... he has been writing in the computer field since the early days and was one of InfoWorld's first columnists. He IS, however, more knowledgable in the field than you are.

[Swordmaker]

And my last Mac OS (I "upgraded" to - I think - OS-X) was kinda buggy and ran slow on my Performa 6400CD. I'm sure a lot's changed since.

You certainly did not upgrade your Performa 6400CD to OS X... it won't run on that computer. Minimum requirement for OS X is a G3 process running at least 300MHz with 256Megs of RAM.

I suspect you upgraded to Mac OS 8.0, which was buggy until 8.1 was released a couple of months later (for free). OS8.5 was also buggy until the release of OS 8.6 just a month later (also free). OSs 7.6, 8.6, and 9.2 were the most stable of the "classic" Mac operating systems until the release of OS X.

By the way, can you name the "bells and whistles" you say overweight the substance of the Mac environment?

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

You are probably right about the operating system. I just remember being disappointed.

As to bells and whistles, I was talking about the marketing approach, which seems aimed at spinster school marms and interior decorators more than CIOs. May be it's just that those are the waters I fish in.

[Swordmaker]

You are probably right about the operating system. I just remember being disappointed.

I was disappointed as well. I recall trying to work with OS 8.0 for about a month... then they released 8.0.4... and it fixed a few problems but added others. I re-installed 7.6 until 8.1 came out.

[ThinkDifferent]

Say I want to put in a second video card in my Mac so that I can have 2 monitors displaying 2 different things at the same time

Macs have been doing that since around 1988. I have dual monitors at home and work, and now find any single mointor system too confining.

you are going to sit there and tell me I can go to the store down the corner pick up a few off the shelf cards, plug em in, get some drivers and boom its going to work?

Not exactly. For starters, any Mac tower made in the last few years already has a dual-head video card, so there's no need to buy anything. If you have an older Mac like mine, you can pick up an ATI or nVidia card (yes, they make Mac versions), plug it in, attach a monitor, and go. There's no "install drivers" step because OS X already includes them.

[ThinkDifferent]

I'm also one of the last hold outs that thought OS/2 was a good platform

It was. I loved OS/2 Warp, but when I saw the Windows 95 beta I knew it didn't have a chance. Not because Win95 was better, it certainly wasn't, but it was "good enough" and when combined with Microsoft's marketing OS/2 didn't stand a chance.

[Chief_Joe]

Nobody would argue that Macs are harder to use...

Macs were easy to use, so they didn't get the respect of nerds who measured their testosterone levels by how fluently they could navigate a command line interface.  Now, I think differently. Now, I think Macs threaten the livelihood of IT staffs...

Cringely writes... 'w'hy are Linux computers gaining in popularity with large organizations while Macs... aren't? While there is certainly a lot to be said for Linux in competition with various flavors of Windows (Linux is 'faster', more memory-efficient, more 'secure'... and is clearly 'cheaper' to buy), the advantage over Macintosh computers is less clear."

...it comes down to the IT Department Full Employment Act. Adopting Linux allows organizations to increase their IT efficiency without requiring the IT department to increase ITS efficiency.

This is a very funny post. You must work for Apple, or you have overly relied on Mr. Cringely's opinions to base this post on. Macs are clearly easier to use, faster, less expensive... -such fantasy not being a given, you have forgotten to mention compatibility with applications needed to run a given business or institution, a minor oversight I'm sure. I guess I can go to bed now that the jokesters are out.

[Swordmaker]

You must work for Apple, or you have overly relied on Mr. Cringely's opinions to base this post on.

No, I'm just objective about it. I work on both platforms... and if I were to select a platform to keep me working and maximizing my income as an IT manager, I too, would recommend the Windows platform. I make far more repair and fix-it calls (which take far longer to fix) to my clients with windoze than I do to those with macs.

[Chief_Joe]

No, I'm just objective about it.

Surely, not Shirley, you jest. Objectively, you say Macs, with presumably OS X.., are easier to network, share printers with, or share files with?  Performing what tasks are they faster? How backwards compatible is OS X.. with legacy Mac OS applications? What's the cost of converting to carbonized, native Mac OS X.. applications? How about drivers for old SCSI components?...You get my point? As for comparing Linux to Mac OS X.., Linux has more standard UIs which makes it an easier platform on which to port other applications.

 

[Chief_Joe]

Ignorance is bliss, isn't it, Benrand?

Mac OSX IS Unix...

Yes, Mac OS X.. is UNIX, but it has proprietary GUI which makes it a more difficult platform on which to develop and port other applications.