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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 Others who claim the need to "translate files" from PC formats to Mac formats are also completely out of date as the Mac can easily open all of the most used PC file formats.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.

Ah yes, the guy WRITING about a field is more knowlegable than the people doing the work? Be real. Macs lost the IT battle years ago.

So, your solution is that IT, which you claim is already too expensive, should support 2 different platforms for N years while the whole organization slowly changes OS and hadware, and that this will save money?????? Obviously you've never planned an IT budget.

Sure its PCI, but whos got the drivers? Eh? You know what MS's single biggest competitive edge is? DRIVERS, pure and simple... I may be able to plug some obscure PCI card into a mac, but that doesn't mean I can use it effectively... Also, how many PCI's can I get in your best MAC? Do I have countless options like PC, or a limited subset of whatever the heck APPLE decides I need? In PC land I can get whatever I want, if I am willing to pay, countless manufacturers fill the gaps that the mass producers avoid.. .Mac has not the ability nor the budget to ever offer some of the hardware configurations I can find off the shelf for PC motherboards....

Macs are nice machines, and I am glad they went to a unix based OS, but they aren't going to take over the corporate desktop... I've walked through apple headquarters hallways, I know people who work there, they do some really neat stuff, but they are not going to become the Enterprise desktop computer.... that's just reality.

Sorry, Mac has lost the battle, its been over for close to 20 years... anyone thinking MAC is even a player in Enterprise desktop is dillusional.

IT decisions are made by inertia... what will give us the biggest improvement with the least pain! Period. To justify PAIN or potential pain in any way shape of form the payoff has to be huge, or it doesn't happen, and guess what, MAC's don't offer nearly a big enough pay off.

Less software, less supported hardware/drivers, less installed base, less developers, less trained administrators, higher acquisition cost, retraining costs, non standard costs and issues... you just won't get it.

Mac is a nice dorm room porn downloader, and "niche" egalitarian fringe toy... and it has some limited adoption in specialized areas in organizations, but its not now, nor any time going to be the desktop of the enterprise.... I've been listening to MAC fanatics make claims like this for about 20 years now, and I counter them all by one simple proven fact.... NAME ME 1, just 1 fortune 1000 company that has in the past 20 years made a corporate wide change of its entire desktop operations to Macintosh? In 20 years of computers, if the benefit were so great, at least 1 company would have done it... and none have, and none will.

I have worked with companies still running software written before I was born! No one even knows exactly what it does, they know they have to execute it to perform a neccessary action, but in terms of the line by line execution no one in the company can tell you... and they are going to just eat the redevelopment costs to go to MAC? Please.

MS moves 17 Million copies of XP in less than 2 months after its release... Macintosh's entire installed base is maybe 2 Million and that's being generous! In fact unit sales have been decreasing consistantly and significantly according to their 10k filings.

Macs are fine machines, and the company does some neat stuff, but arguing that MAC will ever own the desktop enterprise market is humorous.