“About every six months, a particular event in my life as a working CTO forces me to step back and reconsider the Mac as an enterprise platform. Sometimes it’s a discovery I make on my own as a PowerBook user, other times it’s a new software release. This time, it was a simple question from a new salesperson we had just hired: Can I use a Mac here? Peering over the Cinema Display connected to my PowerBook, where I had just been typing, I said, “If you promise not to ask for support or help of any kind, sure.” He quickly agreed to take a PC. This short exchange raised a few issues about Mac support in the enterprise that I hadn’t fully considered until now,” Chad Dickerson writes for InfoWorld (Dickerson is InfoWorld’s Chief Technology Officer).

“The most hardcore Mac evangelists would have you believe that Macs require little end-user support, but with Apple reigniting sales primarily through consumer technology (some call the iPod the “gateway drug” to the OS X platform), I think corporate IT could potentially face a whole crop of end-users who are not the kind of self-supporting Mac enthusiasts to which we’ve all grown accustomed,” Dickerson writes.

“Whenever I even hint at the difficulties of running a Mac in a Windows world, my inbox is flooded with Virtual PC testimonials… Compared to an actual hardware PC, Virtual PC is hardly proof that you can run Windows applications on a Mac,” Dickerson explains. “I will continue to use a Mac because I like it, and I’m willing to support myself 100 percent, but I’m not going to spend my time evangelizing Macs to people who probably should be using PCs. I’m too busy.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Dickerson will support himself on a Mac because he likes it, but wouldn’t it make sense and be beneficial to the company to have other employees on the Mac platform that they’d probably like better (and also want to spend more time working with), too? Why should they “probably be using PCs?” Are they gamers? Perhaps it’s because “that’s the way it’s always been?” Perhaps your company has painted itself into a corner by shortsightedly instituting some Windows-only solution(s) in the past? If so, is that the Mac platform’s fault or is your company’s decision-making process really the issue? If you had insisted on cross-platform solutions, thereby leaving your options open in the future, you’d have no need for emulating platforms with kludges like Virtual PC.

Perhaps you’ve hired a bunch of Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer’s in the past, so to justify their existence on the payroll, you need to keep the Windows platform widespread, so that it will accept your MCSE’s repeated applications of patches for patches that should have been patched before the last patch, but weren’t fully patched until the second to last patch was patched by the latest patch?

Why does the InfoWorld CTO deign to provide himself with (and support himself upon) the superior Mac platform, but seems to feel that the worker bees should have to suffer with the lowly Windows? Condescend much, Mr. Dickerson?