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

Neither I, nor the author of the article, are arguing that Mac would or should "own" the desktop market... merely that it has a place and one that can make things less expensive.

As to Robert X. Cringely, he has been writing about and advocating the MS standard for years. I recall reading his articles in 1981. He is pointing out a theory for the lack of attention the Mac has received... and correlating information and quoted remarks received from the very IT managers about that lack of attention... and making a strong case.

Perhaps, large businesses with their tunnel-visioned IT departments, will never switch to Macs... but they represent only 40% of American business. 60% of Business in America is small business. I can tell you from my own experience that in the small business environment Macs offer a much more economical TCO than the PCs once you figure in maintenance costs, upgrade costs, and the cost of fighting the various virii that infect your prefered world.

The small business owners that I work with that have switched to Macs from PCs are grateful for the switch... and snicker when their competitors complain of MSBLAST.EXE and SOBIG-F or the latest problem du Jur that requires either their preventive intervention or someone else's corrective intervention.

A few that were forced to move from Macs to PCs because of single platform software requirements look longingly back at the Macs and swear at the costs their PCs bring them... one found a Mac solution to his application needs and it was amazing how fast he moved back. With the Macs now being UNIX, many more vertical solution and business applications are available for those who choose a Mac solution.

It is absolutely amazing how quickly PC snobs appear on these discussions claiming superior knowledge about something they have only tangentally looked at or read about in articles mostly written by people with the exact same mindset. It is also amazing how quickly they turn insulting in their attempts to "set us Mac users straight."

Your snide commentary about the Mac being "...a nice dorm room porn downloader, and "niche" egalitarian fringe toy... " show that your mind is completely closed and that you actually have very little knowledge of the Macintosh and its capabilities.

Others are not so closed minded:

Business Week Article: Picking Apple as a Server Solution

Sword,

Look, I am no MS biggot, in fact I'd rather have a Unix server in front of me than any other machine, but that's not the point, nor does it cloud my judgement. Certainly small business can run whatever it wants, and please don't think MACs (or any OS for that matter) are virus free.

I despise MS Windows for a multitude of reasons, security of course being a big one of them... Effectively they are a marketing driven company, not a technology driven company and it causes them to perpetually put out "problematic" software to say the least.

However I don't agree with the premise that MAC's are inherently cheaper. They certainly aren't cheaper to acquire, are not cheaper to upgrade or maintain in terms of parts or service, and because of their smaller footprint in the marketplace are inherently more expensive to administer, because the cost per competent admin is indeed greater because they are in more limited supply.

I have no issues with a small organization choosing a mac, and I can think of pleanty of places where effectively they really are not using their desktops for anything more than glorified word processors and emailers... and maybe some file swapping... and if that is all you are asking of your desktop, ANY OS can deliver it. A 6 person fashion design company doesn't do much with their PC's... so, certainly there is nothing to worry about there.

However when you talk enterprise, and are talking desktop nodes in the thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands, doing all sorts of different tasks and specialized processes as well, the MAC replacement is comical. It just doesn't fly.

You may not be jumping on this MAC for enterprise claim, but plenty in this thread are, and its rediculous and borderline insane to even put that argument forward. Claiming your MAC never needs an OS upgrade or security patch on your home PC compared to your work environment wintel box is just a completely unrelated comparisons. I have have had win 95 boxes in my home that have run without bluescreen for years as well, but I know I can crash a typical desktop running it at will if I so choose.... MS does have pleanty of weaknesses, and i am not a fan of their OS... I think any OS that does not sandbox applications memory space, and doesn't recover that memory after that application dies... isn't even an OS to me.

Macs are fine hardware, and with the newer OS's do bring some very fine things to the table, but there is just no way the enterprise is moving Mac.. that war was lost a long long time ago.