What follows is an anonymous email we received early this morning posted in its entirety:
Dear MacDailyNews,
What a day! And night. Yesterday at work, the whole place was down due to the Blaster worm. Computers freaking out more than usual, except mine. Nobody could get online to access the web or get email and the IT staff, a third of whom were on vacation, were losing their minds.
This is the same IT staff that fought me tooth and nail when I requisitioned my Apple Macintosh computer (PowerBook G4 15-inch). They said at the time that they couldn’t support multiple platforms, that I wouldn’t be able to access the network – all of the usual falsehoods many others experience every day. What I went through to finally gain approval for the Mac purchase I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy! But, in the end, I got my Mac.
Well, yesterday, my Mac was the only functioning computer at work. My Mac handled several important emails which resulted in sales (revenue) for the company – this would’ve been impossible to achieve had we been stuck in a homogenous Windows situation as IT wanted. Basically, without the Apple Mac, no business would’ve been conducted yesterday.
The Mac was used for the first time by several top managers to communicate with their business contacts throughout the day and into the evening. Many of these people came away with a very positive impression of the Mac and seemed bowled over by Mac OS X. The fact that the Mac just worked and all of the Windows PCs didn’t was not lost on these upper management people. In fact, several have scheduled meetings with IT to figure out how to prevent such a mess in the future and one thing they seem to want is to “mix in some Macs around here for safety,” as one manager put it.
So, the Mac came through with flying colors, helped make a great deal of revenue and may have gained a foothold in my company! Perhaps even the IT guys will come around now. Thought you would like to know.
Don’t you think openly promoting our immunity to viruses is too much like a challenge to virus writers to write one and make Apple look stupid? Sometimes the less said the better.
There’s no way Apple can just run an ad touting OSX as virus free but they can dance around the issue by having a Switcher talk about his/her SPECIFIC experience – like stories I’ve heard from other macdailynews threads like – “I’ve had my OSX running for 6 months without a crash, etc …” that’s the kind of switcher campaign to begin to sway IT people.
The prejudice against macs were not built overnight and you can’t change them overnight – and Apple should run TV spots on Sunday morning news programs. They have overall low ratings but they are watched HEAVILY by CEO’s, COO’s, CFO’s, etc … if you want to change the Mac is a toy precept, that’s where to begin … and NOT the G5 spot with the guy being “blown away,” CEO’s and CFO’s want to see substance. If you had a senior level tech guy talking about uptime, running Office, accessing SQL, etc … AND you close with something like “64-bit desktop computing is here – The G5 – Apple Macintosh.”
That’s how you begin a switcher campaign.
I noticed some webhits coming from macdailynews.com and traced this back to Seahwak’s mention of my site. Thanks!
The discussion here on what Apple should advertise is fascinating. My experience with PC people is that you can show them as many Mac facts as you like – better, cheaper, more productive, take your choice – and they’ll accept that as long as you’re standing there with them. Walk away, and ten seconds later they’re back to believing the PC is better, faster, cheaper, etc etc.
Dumfounding isn’t it?
Perhaps a Pixar annimated version of the original lemmings commercial might help — with viruses, worms, costs, and animated complexities (MS Bob?) driving people over the edge while us happy Mac users try hard not to applaud?
I am a longtime Mac user who got his first wintel machine last year. I like having a mixed environment because it gives me more flexibility and functionality.
Ironically, this virus resulted in my internet connection on my MAC getting hosed, not on my PC. Our IT people were trying to stop the spread of the virus and were disabling internet connections based on some sort of IP signature. My mac fit the signiture for some reason and internet access was shut off (but the intranet access was OK). Imagine, I was able to access the internet with my PC, but not the mac. I wasted half a (frustrating) day trying to figure out what was happening, because IT never bothered to notify me that they hosed my connection (Luckily, I went to talk to them before field stripping my mac).
Anyway, one machine often helps me troubleshoot the other, and I have had issues with BOTH. BOTH are great and suck in their own way.
Does anyone else find it strange that this site starts with the latest post first. Maybe this is just a cultural thing (west vs. east, so-to-speak), but I find it damn frustrating.
Just a thought, no offense intended.
Signed,
Long time reader, First time poster
why would we want week old news on the top?
What kind of company survives through a day because of email??!!! The post from the anonymous reader says the Mac solved the problems because it allowed the company to communicate by email to the outside world… guess what genius, Macs and PCs are there for more than email and if that’s all your company needs to make revenue, it is a lame ass company and I feel sorry for any of your clients/customers. C’mon, if the Mac saved the day by running real applications, this would be interesting… as it is, it demonstrates only the incompentence of your whole company. (Guess what, companies used to have _relationships_ with their clients generated by crazy doodads called phones among other items. If you need to send documents, there are things called _faxes_.)
I agree with the people who have said that Apple should make an ad out of this one. They should also try to do it quickly–while the news is still fresh. It doesn’t have to be a TV ad–those can be slower to produce–it could be a newspaper ad. Just get the word out there while it’s still fresh in people’s minds: Macs are not affected.
“What kind of company survives through a day because of email??!!!”
You’re kidding right?
What century are you currently in you dolt?
Sheesh!
These Wintel jerkoffs won’t let up, even when their house of cards is starting to fall around them.
“Don’t you think openly promoting our immunity to viruses is too much like a challenge to virus writers to write one and make Apple look stupid? Sometimes the less said the better.”
I say let them try!
The practical invulnerability of a Mac even configured as a Web Server and available 24/7 was demonstrated with Mac OS 8.x several years ago. A public announcement that a certain text file on the Mac server had a certain line of text, sufficiently unique so as to be impossible to simply guess. The IP address of the server was provided. An invitation to break into this system, read the text file, and provide its contents was said to be worth a $10,000 prize for the first person to do it. Almost two months later, the server was shut down as no takers had come forth. The conclusion was that it is IMPOSSIBLE, not just difficult, to hack into a MODERN OS as found in all Macs, OR that the ability to do so is deemed worth more than $10,000.
Some will argue that it was because the Mac has a smaller user base. I would counter that the Mac OS takes a SENIOR HACKER to crack in and once you’re in there, then what? Its not like a simple worm would be able to pull that same stunt off over thousands of Macs over the internet.
Bah! Like I said, let them try. If they had any real hacking skills they could at least try to impress someone by doing something HARD instead of something as easy as hacking into a Windows machine.
Macs cost more? Go price a PC with similar ad ons…not that much of a difference. Sometimes the Mac is cheaper. Take the G5 for instance go price a similar PC if you can…on most pc sites you will have to look at workstations to get what you get with the dual G5 & the PC’s prices are not cheaper.
I don’t want week-old news at the top. I want the first post at the top, so I can maintain the thread of conversation.
I don’t think that is too much to ask.
Excuse me, Smarter, but what good are faxes when all of the printers are NETWORKED? How do you use the phone when all of your phone lists are ONLINE? How do you do business when you are required to maintain all of your work products on the SERVER? Or are you going to tell us about the crazy doodads called typewriters that can produce hardcopy without a printer? And that typewriter users store their documents in special storage devices called folders? You are obviously a troll.
“Tom” said:
“Steve . . . are you listening Steve? Put your ad agency to work immediately and put out an ad which documents what this virus did and how many computers were infected. Then the simple killer punch line – Not one of them was a Macintosh.”
EXCELLENT idea.
Cost of a mac 3,000 (highend mac too – not talking about G3 emac).
Cost of seeing the windows world sputter and crash after each and every worm attack. Priceless
(Actually the last worm attack was estimated to cost 1 billion dollars in lost worktime, and this one will probably do as much or more damage so I guess the old adage is true- you get what you pay for.)
I think one of the main problems with windows and why it is so susceptible to viruses is because of the registry. Viruses and worms get into the system and rewrited system files. OSX doesn’t have a registry and the system folder is extremely hard to modify. (I’m not even sure if a virus would be able to access it) As such even if a mac were to get a virus (when was the last time THAT happened?) it would unleash havoc like a virus does to a windoze PC with its laughable registry.
It’s great to be a mac user.
Ask any agriculturalist, biologist, ecologist, or forester. They will all tell you that monocultures (i.e. all crops/animals/trees the same) are dangerous, because a deadly enough disease can wipe them out. Diseases that are fatal to a variety of species (i.e. PCs, Macs, Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc.) are extremely rare, hence having a non-monoculture computing environment just makes common sense. I’m sure some in IT would find it more inconvenient to deal with a non-homogenious set of computers, but presumably the organization is not run soley for their benefit.
aout wahat ershler wrote : “Attacking a Windows system is like trying to find holes is swiss cheese.”
As a person using Wintel systems (ok, don’t start with me, I am one of the few open minded ones on this side of the border
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Swiss cheese, in general, do not have holes. Only a particular type of cheese in Switzerland has holes. It’s called Emmenthal and doesn’t sum up for more than 4% of the swiss cheese market !(ok, that may be stretching it in terms of parallels, but you get my point.)
The idea of all Swiss chees having holes is like saying that all Wintel users are stupid or all Mac users are retarded. A little bit of a mental shortcut, better suited for governmental reasoning than for semantic accuracy.
Actually, in our company we use Wintel systems on every level. Heck, we even have a contract with the devil (read “a partnership with Microsoft”). However, none of our systems had any problem during the Blaster attack…
I’m not saying that one is better than the other, I’m just saying that if the IT guys do their jobs right, there’s no reason for such a collapse to happen…
But hey, I like Apple products nonetheless. I even thought about buying an iPod last month
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laterz
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Le Chninkel
Ok.
Here it is.
The difinitive name for you know who:
Micros**t
Let’s be realisitic about
I am a Mac-o-phile all the way from that SE 4/40 in 1989.
Been spreading the word ever since. I can tolerate good PC
hardware in my computer if it runs Linux. The elegance is not
there, but it is usable for what I do. Even the present Mac get booted in Yellowdog Linux every once in a while.
It is Windows that I simply do not like. Security issues, fear of monoculture, GUI aesthetics, whatever the reason.
Let’s be realistic about something here, shall we?
OS X security is about average for non-microsoft OS’s. A newly-installed OS X box doesn’t vend any services, and it’s fairly difficult to use remote-root exploit on any box that’s not listening on the ports you’re trying to use to break in.
HOWEVER, OS X isn’t intrinisically any more secure than any other UNIX. UNIX suffers from a few serious design flaws. The first one is that there is such a thing as a root account. Compromise root, and you can do *anything*. It’s great that OS X ships with the root account disabled, but there’s only so much that can be done when an OS implements the setuid function at all.
Let me put it this way: OS X is a brick-faced, wood-framed house. With a bit of attention, it can be secured from fires. Windows is a balsa-wood house, covered in gasoline-soaked flash paper, with crates of TNT in the attic, and boxes of kitchen matches (the kind that strike on any surface) scattered about the floors.
The long and short of it is, OS X’s security really only looks this good because windows is SO bad.
Let me add, though..
Apple’s server group is very good about putting out potential fires as soon as they become aware of them. Most of the security vulnerabilities that OS X has ever had, have been patched by a software update long before the script kiddies had a chance to damage any OS X hosts.
indeed John,
usually Apple comes with: “here is a security patch. It fixes this flaw” and that is the first time you hear of the flaw.
Microsoft comes as: “here is this flaw, a patch will follow” and that is the last time you hear of the patch in months.
Hey R.V.- I truly hope you are not a server admin. It’s the same iginorance that you have shown here that has caused this virus to wreak havoc in the business world. Switching to Macs is not going to keep the world safe from viruses and worms, and whatever else may be coming down the pipeline. I work in a fully Wintel environment. We were not affected by this worm in any way. Why? Because our Windows admins made sure our systems were patched, and configured correctly. Also that proxies and firewalls are in place and those were configured correctly.
Oh, and the Macs you mentioned that were impossible to hack…were hacked. It’s a contest that they run every year or two. Not a one-time thing. it was hacked last year. Macs don’t get hacked, but not because they are impossible to hack. They don’t get hacked because there aren’t enough Mac servers to worry about hacking them, nor are there enough people out there who know enough to hack the Mac. What kind of serious damage will you really cause if you are able to hack a Macintosh? Big whoop! It would take you longer to actually find enough mac servers out there, than to hack them.
By the way…What platform was the first virus found on, genius?