Replies

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.