Comment from: pkradd
I used to work for a company that employed 150 people. We all had computers on our desks. The IT personnel at the company hated Macs. One of them told me that it was simply a matter of economics - for him. Macs didn't break down as much and they would have less to do and hence no job security. Oh yes, this was 5 years ago!
Comment From: mattmattbobatt
About ten years ago I was running a department computing facility at a university. We used to pool research money to maintain the computing infrastructure and support about 150 users. When researchers at other universities were caught by NSF using research money for junkets and yachts they clamped down and we couldn't pool our grant money anymore.
So we ended up needing to analyze how our resources were being used, by platform, so we could switch to a chargeback scheme instead of a per capita fee. We had VMS, unix, Windows and Mac users to support. (remember this was the early 90's). The results weren't too suprizing. The VMS machines required the most man-hours per machine. Followed by Windows, unix and way, way down were Macs. When a new machine arrived we had to get it set up, install an OS and get it on the network. VMS machines took a day while unix and NT took about six hours. How long for the Macs ? About 30 minutes. Really.
Eventually we had to cut IT staff and we cut out all the specialists and kept guys who could do a little unix, Windows and Macs. They spent most of their time on PC stuff. When a new faculty member arrived we pushed them to the Mac so they could spend more money on research and less on support.
I did some consulting at a large consulting firm for a while and when I would go talk to the IT guys I was supporting they would tell you flat out that they didn't like Macs because they feared for their jobs. They plugged them in and they never touched them again. That's why IT staffs hate Macs.
Comment from: trevor7578
My company is run entirley on Macs. CAD, Filemaker, Flexware, FastTrack, Photoshop, Palms, AppleWorks, MS Office, Digital Photo Archiving, Safari Web ordering. We are not an advertising company. We are a high end construction company with about 60 networked macs. We have no IT department. I am in charge of sales and I run IT in my very spare time. I spend hardly any time or $$$ mainting the network. It's awesome. Any company that dismisses Macs in business is out of their minds. The employess easily learn how to use the computers and they very rarely break down. It's a complete joke that Apple gets pushed out of business computing!
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.
Modularity. A PC can be tailored far more exactly to what each user needs, simply because there are more and a greater variety of producers of PC hardware than Mac. And that tailoring means less money is wasted on resources that are not needed.
Software development. The great albatross of the old Mac was the lack of anything to run on it. So producing software on a Mac became a niche business. Nowadays, despite more software availability, this means that the number of places I can go to get software developed for my Mac is less than for my PC. So if a small business needs a particular eclectic software constructed, it has very few and much more expensive options if it is running Mac hardware. I can't throw a rock out my window without hitting a PC software engineer.
Oh, and as far as games are concerned, the 1400+ different games that someone's search found are the newest and most modern. This is just a syptom of point 2. It doesn't pay to expend the resources to develop games for the Mac, especially now that the average top-shelf game costs $2-$4 million to develop. There aren't enough Mac users/gamers to recoup those development costs. So the problems with Mac games are a good window into the reasons that Mac will never be commercially viable in most businesses....