“Years ago computers were first bought mostly by companies to help with getting the jobs done. Next, after some time and the prices started coming down, company workers who saw how they worked at their job decided to get one for home “to do some work at home,” so that they could “get ahead” at work. Getting a computer for work and home is almost standard practice today among Americans,” Dennis Sellers writes for Macsimum News,
“But recently with all of the problems with Microsoft’s Windows problems and headaches more and more people are either switching from Windows to Macs at home or seriously considering switching. The reason? They see and experience all of the problems that they and their IT department has with the computers and the sometimes draconian way the IT department handles ‘new requests’ for changes to a worker’s computer; it becomes a fight to get things done. Some of the draconian ways the IT department handles things are necessary because of the lack of consistencies by company personnel, but this also prevents better tools like the Mac and Linux to break through the IT Windows shield,” Sellers writes.
“So more and more company employees are ditching their Windows computers and buying Macs for home,” Sellers writes.
“Is this the end of the issue? No. Because what we’re now seeing is that because of the downsizing, rightsizing, and other aspects of corporate shedding of jobs is that now the these workers are ‘thinking for themselves’ and switching to Macs because they know the problems they could have if they bought Windows for their own home and start up businesses,” Sellers writes. “…An interesting trend with the home purchases of Macs is that some of those hard-working people that are still working in corporate America are beginning to see what all older Mac users see: the myth that Macs are incompatible with Windows just isn’t true. They have been using their Macs at home for a while and are seeing how Macs can be favorably used in their work situations. They’re beginning to take their Mac laptops from home into work with them. They not only enjoy working on a Mac, but since they have fewer problems they’re able to get things done quicker on them at work.”
Sellers asks, “Would you rather take 30 steps to get something done on a Windows computer or about half that on a Mac? Then there are those who don’t use their work computer for much and don’t use all of its features because it’s too difficult to try to find out how to get something done or to get an answer to do a task. And some folks are simply tired of the number of reboots on a Windows system compared to a Mac. All these things result in saved time when using a Mac. It also means that employees are more productive when they’re happier—and that saves money for the company. Most of the problems come from the IT departments who see managers and directors buying Macs and tell them ‘so you bought into Apple’s marketing schemes’ when they bring in their Macs from home. But will upper or senior management listen to these cries of wanting better quality from the computer purchases?”
Sellers argues that Macs will come through corporate America’s back door in his full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: There are many other reasons why the “IT guy” doesn’t want to discuss Macs, from job security to quite powerful psychological issues. More on the latter here: Defending Windows over Mac a sign of mental illness.
Related articles:
A corporate view of Apple’s Boot Camp announcement – April 07, 2006
Apple takes No. 1 spot in western Europe education; next step: overcome corporate IT ‘mistrust’ – March 05, 2006
Can Apple’s switch to Intel processors help Mac crack Windows’ corporate desktop stranglehold? – February 27, 2006
Is it time for your business to consider Apple Macintosh? – January 26, 2006
InformationWeek: Intel-based Macs won’t cause many businesses to replace their Windows PCs – January 16, 2006
Survey shows Apple Macs owned by nearly 10 percent of US small and medium-sized businesses – February 17, 2005
Group of America’s largest corporations complain about software vulnerabilities, security expenses – May 20, 2004
Here at the bank I work at, I have been able to open up some eyes to folks switching to Macs. It won’t be long!
Microsoft, yes Microsoft, makes a great Remote Desktop Clint for Mac OS X that costs nothing. It will allow you to remotely access Windows 2000 & XP Pro PC’s and Microsoft servers from your Mac. It works well and gets the job done. Unlike shareware or 3rd party solutions, IT cannot claim it won’t work well with Windows as it is made by MS and certified for their software.
More info here
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/otherproducts/otherproducts.aspx?pid=Article_RDC
Download Here
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.aspx?pid=download&location;=/mac/download/misc/rdc_update_103.xml&secid=80&ssid=10&flgnosysreq=True
“So more and more company employees are ditching their Windows computers and buying Macs for home,” Sellers writes.
Data?
I’m in an TI dept. and I’m telling you, the biggest problem with Mac adoption is the lack of things like ERP software.
What is ERP software? Maybe someone needs to write it and make some serious cash……
I’m the lone Mac user in a sea of pcs here in my office. Couldn’t be happier! Well, okay, I would be more happy with a quad-G5 on my desk instead of the G4 iMac…
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I was told I couldn’t bring my MacBook Pro into work because we have a policy against bringing personal laptops in due to the possibility of infecting our networks with viruses. Then again, we don’t use Linux because free can’t be any good.
Interestingly, Apple has been using SAP for quite a few years. Do you suppose they are using PC’s to run it? No.
SAP is the largest ERP vendor (neck in neck with Oracle) and they do have and provide a Mac GUI for OS X (although I have never used it myself). Given that Ellison has always had a friendly relationship with Jobs, if Oracle does not support Macs, I am sure they could be persuaded to do so. All in all however, I would agree that many Enterprises running an ERP system “think” that Macs will not work in their environments simply because IT it not really interested in their user’s productivity, but more interested in maintaining their own self interest. Ironically, each time I get involved in a new SAP project, we go through a litany of meetings regarding “security”, but never once does anyone point out the insecurity of Windows.
THE reason technogeeks and IT pros don’t like Macs is because in a Mac-less world or company they are quite special. In the Windows-only world they have special, exclusive knowledge that separates them from everyone else, gives them “status, makes them feel “NEEDED”, and “in the know”, the guy (or girl) that “has all the answers”, the “go to guy”, the person all family & friends rely upon. This is oh so very real, and quite far from being insane. The thing of it is, many don’t even know that’s the overriding reason for their preference for Windows, and contempt (often hatred) for all things Apple. Throw in the fact that Apple’s products are ‘cool’, and they view Mac users as ‘cool’ style over substance people, the popular crowd, the A-list being about 5% of a high school’s population.
Well, one by one my family & friends have switched to Macs, and those who dragged their feet got used Macs for Christmas or birthdays, complete with shareware to make the Apple menu equivalent to the Start button, Butler on the Menu Bar the equivalent to the Quick Launch area, and the dock configured to be the running application switcher. (Only one recipient ignored the Mac in favor of their PC – until it came time for the annual hard drive reformat & fresh XP reinstall that I kept putting off – for 2 months. Eventually, when the hardware crapped out it came to time to purchase another computer. Well, he kept putting off the purchase, and started using the Mac I gave him . . . to this day.) As such, my friends & family don’t call me as often, don’t invite me for dinner as often, my importance diminished to that of any other friend or family member. Apart from the occasional Mac question I’m not burdened with their problems anymore, I no longer feel as special and – I do miss being needed.
Ah, but the pluses do outweigh the minuses. Besides, to this day I enjoy their gratefulness, and the permanent status of being the one who took the thorn out of the lions’ paw.
MDN word, “really” as in “really”
I’ve never posted on here before, but this article just hit home. I work in the small art department of a much larger company and last week they informed us that within a few weeks they will take away our macs and we will all be forced to used PCs. (I may actually quit if this comes to fruition!) I’ve been looking for some good non-bias info to present to our worthless IT dept to convince them that macs are certainly not the root of all evil like they make it out to be. Its not that I can’t use a PC, its that I simply don’t want to!
Dennis Sellers is a poor writer and his editor – if indeed he has one – needs to be drawn and quartered.
Is he Bulgarian?
We’re now on PC’s at work and just to make a bullet point it’s:
alt0149
How can anybody say a pc is better when you have to work that way.
It’s definatly a backward experience.
Pippy, Wikipedia is your friend:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ERP_software
Make an all in one imac with a standard 17″ and 19″ screen (not cinema widescreen which is a pain for office applications), option out the airport and Blutooth (for security purposes), strip the iLife software, and sell for $999 ($100 more than the educational model). I’ll buy 50 as workstations tomorrow.
Without that, I’m going from 100% Apple to half Apple (for mini cpu’s) and half Samsung (for monitors) and will put up with the silly power brick and wiring, continue to lock down Airport and Blutooth, and throw out the iLife software.
IT has never had the best interests of the user at heart — NEVER. IT views workers the way liberals view voters — people that don’t know what’s best for them, people who are fit to be ruled, people who can’t handle freedom, and people you can never trust. For the IT royalty, it’s all about making themselves look good when they are just kings of nothing. All that byzantine data they carry around in their minds, what is it good for? It is good for social prestiege, because the actual utility of making an old jalopy of an OS work is practically nil. The truth is you will not find a more hidebound, mentally straitjacketed group of people anywhere in the world except as Islamic theologians.
Most Oracle ERP installations are hosted on larger Unix servers, but the web portals to the system can (and do) run very well on Macs. I use a PB15 for accessing my client’s Oracle system.
We get them all the time. The trick… Tell Corporate IT that you are ordering Unix Workstations.
Anyone know some good references that break down (in an unbias way) the advantages of keeping my mac at work versus switching to a PC? From a networking standpoint, I’m a pain to deal with, or so I’m told.
I feel that telling them using a PC goes against everything I beleive in just won’t cut it.
Why can’t this article be picked up by the AP? That is exactly what mainstream America needs to hear.
Case in point – yesterday, it took me and hour and a half to do something on PowerPoint that I could have done on Keynote in 10 minutes AND it would have looked a hell of a lot better AND I could have done it the way I wanted to and not made so many work arounds/hack jobs to get it done.
You might get some good points from this article from, of all places, Networkworld.com! You will need to subscribe (free) to read the whole article, however.
http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2005/052305schwartau.html
MDN is likely wrong in their surmise that I.T. people are scared of losing their jobs due to Macs.
I found that many, but not all I.T. people, just don’t have a clue about Macs and so are fearful of the unknown more than they are of it taking their jobs away. They also still see them as “graphics” or “media” tools rather than as a serious business computer.
I used to work in an I.T. dept. of a medium sized company and they were PC all the way – even so far as getting a PC to be used as a “media” machine, despite my strong recommendations of a Mac for editing company videos, burning DVDs etc. The machine sat idle most of the time and I was often called to help those who had to use it (which of course, was like rubbing salt into my wounds.) This was a few years ago, but I still remember the intitial installation and testing the various apps such as DVD burning which of course crashed on startup and needed updating, which in turn required registration…. no easy to obtain downloads that day. It was a pathetic experience compared with iLife coming preinstalled and just working.
Part of the problem is also the business software available – it’s a heck of a lot easier just to presume that a piece of software will run on your office PCs running Windows w/o having to spend the time researching whether it will (as you do with Macs and corporate software.) I can also picture some of the larger vendors snickering at you when you ask about Mac support.
The most widespread not-available-on-the-Mac product used at that company was probably MS Access. Most departments had some staff with databases using MS Access as a back end (either by firing up MS Access or by using its libraries and having a stand-alone app written by an external 3rd party). It’s the most common choice for many people – despite its flaws. I hated it – it didn’t use standard SQL but some twisted, bastardized version, corrupted files regularly, and basically sucked in a lot of ways. It’s a product which has had its time and needs to be rewritten, but even if MS did so, it’s highly unlikely they’d port it to the Mac given its strategic importance in securing, and now maintaining, a Windows foothold.
Someone mentioned Oracle – they do have a version of its database for Mac OS X, but I’m not sure about their other tools (appears from above comments they do support Macs – this is great news!)
It’s interesting to note that many years ago, a brilliant early Business Intelligence product known as Gentium was developed (later changed names to Gentia) It was originally authored on the NeXT system, and ported to Windows. Nowadays I don’t know what’s happened to it (Google searching reveals it’s been bought out and can apparently be run in Java) My point is that NeXT of course is OS X’s heritage – if only it would be taken more seriously perhaps more amazing business tools will be written or ported across to Macs.
I wanted.
You are on the money. While IT people usually object to macs it is the availability of native biz software that kills the macs on the enterprise.
Also a lot of software vendors use tools that are tied to proprietary MS technology so even if they wanted to support macs it would be difficult for them.
I may acquire a biz that will require me to use a scheduling app on MS Access (yuck!) so I may host it at someone’s server and access it via my mac browser so I don’t have to deal with installing Windows on my environment.
The lack of mac in enterprise is this:
Outlook.
Yeah, it’s just an email program, but it integrated with a calendar and contacts. And it works on exchange. Apple needs to CLONE outlook and implement in OSX natively. Entourrage is not enough. Change it’s name to MacOutlook, and you’ll uptake.
LC:
Check out:
http://securityawareness.blogspot.com/2005/09/mad-as-hell-finale-recommendations-and.html
This is a site with downloadable Total Cost of Ownership spreadsheets showing how much less Macs cost over time.
Also see John Gruber’s excellent essay at:
http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/broken_windows
Finally, go to the article here on MDN called “Symantec: Microsoft’s ‘improvements’ to Vista could cause instability, new security flaws” at:
http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/10213/
and if that one isn’t enough, there are lots of great additional stories about how insecure Windows is and Vista will be. Good luck.
Bibliotech
I am currently porting several large Access databases to Filemaker Pro 8 Advanced. Thanks to several improvements in FMP 8 Advanced this is proving to be a simpler project than I expected. Of course, mid-project, Filemaker has released FMP 8.5 which may be even better, but my point is that Access databases can be converted to a cross platform solution fairly easily now. Hopefully I can use this experience to help more of my clients switch the Macs.