“John Halamka has a penchant for experiments with new technologies. In 2004, the now 44-year-old CIO of the Harvard Medical School and CareGroup, which runs the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who is also a practicing emergency room physician, was one of the first people to have an RFID chip containing a link to his medical records implanted in his body,” Meridith Levinson reports for CIO.
“The PCs inside the hospital have to work too. So when Halamka’s laptop running Windows XP interrupted several presentations with inopportune antivirus and application updates, he decided his next big initiative would be to determine which desktop operating system—Windows XP, Apple’s OS X or Linux—is the most secure, most reliable and easiest to use in a corporate environment,” Levinson reports. “For three months, Halamka ditched his Windows laptop. He replaced it first with a MacBook running OS X. Then he spent a month using a Lenovo ThinkPad X41 running a dual-boot configuration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation and Red Hat Fedora Core. Finally, he took up a Dell D420 subnotebook running Microsoft’s Windows XP.”
“Halamka judged the three operating systems according to a variety of criteria including their performance, user interfaces and enterprise management capabilities, such as the ability to configure applications, easily organize file systems, and establish granular security control,” Levinson reports. “Halamka tested the operating systems himself before testing them with users because he wanted to know firsthand what problems users might encounter and get a sense of whether his IT department will be able to easily and cost effectively maintain the platform. He conducted the experiment before the release of Apple’s Leopard and Microsoft’s Vista operating systems for two reasons: He had the time in his schedule to learn the nuances of the different operating systems, and he prefers testing established, stable technologies rather than new releases.”
“‘I used to think that the Macintosh was something used by free spirits just to be different,’ he says. ‘Now I realize the Mac has such superior human factor engineering that it’s used by people because they can be more productive. If Apple comes up with a 2- or 2.5-pound 12-inch-screen laptop that runs cool, has better integration with Exchange, and if Vista turns out to be the beast it could be, then I probably will move to a Mac,'” Levinson reports.
Full article – very comprehensive – with much more here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “GimliNZ” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: Sounds like Apple should rethink a replacement for the 12-inch PowerBook. A lightweight 12-inch MacBook Pro would be a welcome addition to Apple’s portable lineup.