“When Apple lets slip the leash on Leopard this Friday, its predatory instincts will be trained on Microsoft and Steve Ballmer’s blood will be scented in the twitching nostrils of its, er, operating system,” Martin Veitch writes for The Inquirer.
“Yes, I know, but as well as tempting hacks the world over with the possibility of untold numbers of rubbishy metaphors and similes, Leopard is Apple’s best chance in a decade and a half at clawing back (oh bloody hell, it’s happening again) market share in the dull but fantastically lucrative world of fluorescent lighting, datacentres and systems ordered by the fleet. In short, the corporate client computing world,” Veitch writes.
“It’s well established that the Ipod and Iphone have created a halo effect on Apple’s desktop and notebook business, both of which are growing at wonderful rates. Most of these sales have been to consumers but Apple has half a chance of converting IT shops too,” Veitch writes.
“The old wisdom is that Microsoft has deep hooks into business and these can never be severed because of dependency on legacy software, systems, skills and processes. That’s true up to a point but the times are changing,” Veitch writes.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “IT-git” for the heads up.]
Just this morning I was talking to an IT guy with a major health care HMO who admitted he’d never even touched a Mac.
I set him straight with my iPhone, and he’ll be looking at a Mac now.
does anyone else hate it when people write iPod as Ipod, etc?
mdn word: language… as in learn the apple language
Ain’t gonna happen.
IT departments are loaded with WinHacks who know that if they switch to OS X servers they’ll have to let half their staffs go since fewer people are required to run OS X-based networks. You have to convince the higher-ups that their (supposedly) subordinate IT departments must switch.
Good luck, Apple.
can you add a Mac to Active Directory? I know that Macs and PC’s can share folders/files across networks using SMB but I think using Active Directory would be important to IT Managers in PC only shops…
yes, you can add a Mac so that you log into it with an AD account.
To really be serious in the business world Apple needs to release a competitive multi-session product similar to (but better than) Microsoft’s Widows Terminal Server 2003 – soon to be 2008. That would be sweet, and it would make businesses take a serious look at Apple as an alternative to MS. Do it Apple – Do it!
Skabeetle:
“Mac Computers on Windows Networks
Apple has gone well beyond generic standards-based support. Mac OS X builds in support for all of Microsoft’s proprietary Active Directory services: Microsoft Kerberos authentication; Active Directory authentication policies, such as password changes, expiration, and forced password changes; and Active Directory replication and failover.
This means Mac computers work with Active Directory in much the same way Windows clients do. Macintosh systems can use existing Active Directory networks and Exchange mail servers, Microsoft’s VPN server and Microsoft Office applications. Administrators can maintain Mac OS X user names and passwords in Active Directory, authenticate Mac OS X users with Active Directory and allow users to mount their network home directory based on information stored in Active Directory. Mac OS X can also discover multiple domain controllers and automatically determine the closest one. If a domain controller becomes unavailable, the Mac system uses another nearby domain controller.
Because these capabilities are built into Mac OS X, you can take advantage of them without expensive software add-ons or time-consuming changes to the Active Directory schema.”
http://www.apple.com/itpro/articles/adintegration/
I’ll second KDC’s suggestion. But there are two routes, and both have their place.
The first would permit the running of Windows sessions by remote Mac users. This is for those occasions when they absolutely, positively need access to Windows (without having a separate license on each box) from the desktop Mac. That’s how I ran my Windows apps from my Solaris desktop long ago.
The second essentially reverses the process. Windows clients would wean themselves away by opening a session into a multi-user Xserve, getting their taste of OS X.
Obviously, I’m partial to the first approach. More real Mac boxes, without the performance penalty, and only a few Windows licenses. Because that’s the world we want to see.
Luke: I’m with you on that, sadly. No way are giant corporate IT departments who are accustomed to ordering the cheapest, clumsiest, junkiest crap from Dell or Lenovo going to pick up Macbooks. The Windows losers who work in the IT department can’t even dress themselves properly, so to expect them to recognize the business advantage of using Apple hardware and OS X is a pipe dream.
magic word : “how”
exactly what I was thinking when I watched the demo…
When OS X becomes appealing to the mindless drones with commitees full of the technically inept demanding countless tabs packed full of pointless options, it just lost me as a proponent.
Leave OS X the simple and elegant way it is and leave the corporate circus with ten layers of options to Windows. Bloat, complexity and overhead are not welcomed. BTW, I am in a “Fortune 1000” IT shop. Yep, it sucks.
The IT team around here (very large corporate environment) still consider the Mac a novelty and those of us who keep waving and shouting from the back of the room as an annoyance to serious discussion about the reliance on MSoft and Windows now and forever.
They often say when the head guy doesn’t even dress seriously when he comes out of hiding to promote his latest ‘toy’ that he will never be part of Corporate America.
Apple is going to still have some difficult barriers to make inroads in to the corporate world. XCode 3 will hopefully help, but to really break in tools with the ease of use like RealBasic but supporting other languages will be needed. The business world is still in the early stages of dot Net conversion, and J2EE isn’t going away either. Yet these platforms are wrought with implementation and expandability difficulties. Apple will need to embrace the more open platforms and come up with alternatives, or make these solutions runnable on their platforms in order to make larger inroads in to business.
Admittedly, I do speak from the business development point of view….
Actually, from anecdotal evidence, Macs are already beginning to make modest inroads into business areas previously dominated by Windows. The real-world model does not necessarily involve an all-or-nothing approach – throw out all the Win systems and replace them with a Mac system.
Rather, many businesses I know are adding Macs to the periphery of their IT ecosystem. Most are adding just one or maybe a handful of Macs (depending on their size) into areas that do not involve them having to uproot their whole IT system.
Sometimes, the IT personnel get overridden by CEOs and other bigger honchos in businesses who are enamoured with the Apple halo and reach a compromise with their IT guys to include a Mac or two into the operations.
A foothold has definitely been established. Whether that footprint gets to be of a significant size remains to be seen.
It is also necessary to point out that in certain business sectors – particularly the “creative” ones, such as graphics-heavy businesses – Macs have been and continue to be the platforms of choice.
Complete nonsense. Microsoft is entrenched in the enterprise for one reason and one reason only: QUALITY. Microsoft makes the best of the best. Only MAC sheep would argue with their namby-pamby notions of “end user experience” and “ease of use” and how about MAC lemmings old standby “it just works?”
I’m here to tell you MAC-tards that Microsoft has taken ease of use, end user satisfaction and seamless plug and play to a level Apple could never dream of. Heard of Zune and Zune Marketplace, anybody? And don’t give me that crap about Microsoft’s “underhanded” business practices or other nonsensical conspiracy theories. Microsoft is on top because they are the top. It’s gonna take more than a hippy toymaker to bring them down. Losers.
Your potential. Our passion.™
Sounds like the old mainframe/terminal vs desktops/server arguments revisited. Business just wants things to work… efficiently with minimum down time. Pragmatism always wins. And appl is well on its way to breach the walls. Vista/m$ is an old fortress with thick stone walls that Big cat tech has made pregnable and obsolete.
Will Leopard make businesses change their spots? Or will they continue to be catty?
Is it set to pounce and devour Microsoft’s marketshare?
Will it make my “mouse” more snappy?
…
Ok, I’m done.
the point is Apple is grabbing some of this market, where before they had none.
the bottom line wins in the end and Apple offers a solution that is so much better.
These above opinions are just that opinions.
The facts are we are growing in a place where we have not before.
10.5 is going to make this happen faster.
this is a fact
deal with it and stop telling me your bullshit about how it is not going to happen as it is happening now
WINDOZE DOES NOT LAST FOREVER
trust me
“The first would permit the running of Windows sessions by remote Mac users.”
You mean like you can already do with this guy:
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/otherproducts/otherproducts.aspx?pid=remotedesktopclient
No doubt the Mac will win some entry into enterprise environments. But the biggest change has to be made at Apple, not just the software. IT Drones ™ like product roadmaps, which Apple historically hasn’t provided. But even discounting that, Apple would need to overhaul their support operation to make them palatable to enterprise customers. Perhaps they can leverage a third party for this, but without it their enterprise wins will be limited in the near term. Finally, there’s also the issue of Apple as a single source provider. Many enterprises require competitive bids and multiple sources for their infrastructure needs. That’s something Apple will never be able to change.
But even with all that, 2% of the enterprise market would be a huge win. I don’t think anyone would disagree on that point.
Win the colleges and you’ll eventually win the home. Win both of those and 5-7 years down the road business will follow. What Apple needs now, I think is a Mini that is a bit weaker and a bit cheaper for the business boys.
Damn, Zune!
You sound like you’re getting pissed off.
Three cheers for the hippy toy maker. Woo hoo!
I agree with Mr. Jobs. Bill Gates needs to drop a tab for some insight. It wouldn’t hurt Ballmer either – although he might see everything as food and try to eat it.
Man, ZuneTang sure is grumpy today
KDC…
You’re right, Apple needs a terminal server.
And if you go here, you can see the product they helped build. It’s at an early stage of evolution, but its potential is clear to anyone with a functioning IQ by looking at the development roadmap.
If you need more info, sign up to macenterprise.org and they should have the webcast from last month available for streaming by now.
Is anyone else tired of journalists who capitalize the “i” in iMac, iPhone, iPod, etc.?
Are they that oblivious to details???
My first post here – HAD TO POST on this topic!
Personally, I admit I am a Mac fanatic – personally having converted at least a couple of dozen users to a mac in the last 2 years. we have 3 active macs at home and a appleTV.
Professionally, I work in a (very) large software company and I am one of the few handful that use a mac (2.4 core2duo, 2GB ram). I have to admit it is a pain to use it work. The browser I love the most – Safari sucks at corporate environment with http auth and some cross server authentication – so I have to rely on firefox.
Printing is a joke – many times it would just spool and a reboot will send it to the printer.
MS Office under rosetta is too slow to use with large presentations (“converting windows metafile” messages keep possping up for almost all presentations that get passsed around in my company), Actually word and excel are usuable but Powerpoint is the main thing I use and is not good, Entourage sucks and is not reliable in handling meeting invites. With everyone using the new 2007 formats running into major problems.
I know msoffice is not a apple issue, but this will impede adoption period. safari, single-on, VPN solutions (ours works only under firefox under rosetta and not reliable)… back up protection – it will be many years till most large company IT infrastructure is mac friendly.
@grrr
Yep, and that would be “Apple language”!
–does anyone else hate it when people write iPod as Ipod, etc?
–mdn word: language… as in learn the apple language
@MotoBell
“With everyone using the new 2007 formats running into major problems.”
Dude, even prior Windows Office users are having problems with 2007 formats. This happens any time a software program makes major changes to the file format. Either everyone upgrades at once or the ones living on the bleeding edge needs to learn how to save down to the compatable file version. Better yet, IT needs to set the prefs permanatly to save to the old version. That way, clueless users don’t have to think.
“Printing is a joke – many times it would just spool and a reboot will send it to the printer.”
You either have some bad printers, configured wrong or something else screwed up. All my customers, many who print huge prepress files and very complex PDFs have no problems printing to many printers. The same printers that PC users also print to. Been doing this for 17 years. It’s always been a crap printer or someone did not configure it right.
Printing from a Mac has always been a breeze.
Powerpoint I’ll give ya. It sucks ass. Of the three main MS apps it is the worst. It has memory leaks and is just a plain hog.
“back up protection”
Retrospect. Been around since 1980s. Now owned by EMC Insignia. Backup your desktop, your server or your whole dam network. Have used it for over a decade. Works great, yes some issues lately but I blame the new owners on being slow. Currently run it on an Intel Xserve, backing up 500 GB a nite, no problem.
” VPN solutions (ours works only under firefox under rosetta and not reliable”
Not sure what going on there. I have used OS X’s built in VPN client with at least 3 different VPN servers and never any issues. Yes some non-standard VPN servers might have issues, but that would be non-standard. Hmmm.
I don’t mean to come down on you but I see a very different picture with Mac compatability all over the place.
Recently, despite the fact that my company runs almost all Windows machines, I happened to overhear my company’s CIO and SVP extolling the virtues of Macs to one of his top managers. I think a switch is unlikely, at least for the foreseeable future, but it certainly was encouraging that he is open-minded enough to actually discuss them.
Martin,
I wish you were right, but we’ll have to wait for Microsoft to screw up a few more times before this has a chance of becoming reality.
zuneTang needs some punTang
that’ll ease the grumpies
@MotoBell
The king of all VPN vendors, Cisco, doesn’t play nice with Windows or OS X VPN clients. I’ve tried to get the Mac VPN client to work, but I’m stuck using Cisco’s odd little VPN client.
Personally, I’ve found the Mac much better at communicating with printers and had hell with Windows over the years.
zune tang needs to pull Balmer’s dick out of his ass !!!
@McMac & @Think
Again I love my macs – but trying to use Mac (mine is supported by IT) in a windows centric world of IT is a pain.
“Browser”
My favorite browser is Safari (not sure if it is the brushed metal or .mac sync) – but it sucks using our portal and authentication on most internal sites do not work. So I use Firefix for our internal sites, and firefox under rosetta (dupliate .app ) for VPN
“Printing”
It finds the printers fast by name but there are spooling issues most of the time. Evrytime I had problems, firing up VMWare Fusion/XP confirms that it is working fine. I have run into this problem several times across our many global offices – also print speed on some of the lexmark printers is too slow (not sure if it using generic poscript or something)
“VPN”
we use F5 networks and it only works under Firefox Rosetta
“Office”
Agree with you that my IT can help versus letting people adopt at their own pace by setting defaults – clueless users cause the file format problems, but powerpoint is a memory hog and useless. also I have the floating tools bars.
My point is that without full blown ms office, it is hard to effectively use in a enterprise.
Windows-based companies will either evolve or die. It’s that simple. Windows isn’t hip anymore; it’s stodgy and stale, and everyone knows it. If companies want to compete with cut-rate Indian and Chinese tech shops, they’re going to have to cut costs somewhere, and the IT department is looking mighty fat.
I just unleashed my business beast.
They want to me to go home and shower now and talk to H.R. tomorrow morning. I just hope no one got hurt.
I run a small business and am busily moving away from Windows to OS/X. However, my experience suggests that Apple have a long way to go before OS/X can be considered as a credible business option for any but the most basic business needs…
A few months ago I had reason to call Apple support about a problem with OS/X Server Mail. The Mail GUI can screw up the underlying Unix text-based (yuk) configuration files and, in this case, Mail wouldn’t run at all.
After some time I spoke to a charming fellow in North America – who told me he was the only support person on duty for OS/X Server in what was my daytime, but US night-time. And he didn’t know anything about Mail – or, in fact, any other aspect of OS/X Server beyond a basic understanding of the GUI.
I found the problem myself, removing a line in the config file to do with anti-spam measures. But the experience was not reassuring.
Add to this some serious issues with internationalisation (does anyone know how to change the default language in Pages so that the rest of the world is not forced to spell like Americans?) suggests that Apple not only have a long way to go before they are ready to play in the business environment, but that they are not serious about doing so.
@ Raymond from DC
M$’s Remote Desktop Connection for Mac works quite well for Windows Terminal Server Sessions. I use it all the time. Citrix also makes a Mac client which works quite well.
Well, if Leopard was supposed to launch Mac’s into the business world, their boosters failed miserably.
Large companies and universities are not going to drop their Windows (Active Directory) server structure just because MacOS server can do some neat stuff. There are far too many 3’rd party software solutions that are in use in these institutions to jump ship.
That being said, the new Active Directory plugin for 10.5 is entirely flawed. Until they can get that sorted out, there is no way an institution is going to put those machines in place. I have a good half-dozen machines waiting for Leopard before they go out to users, and there are dozens already in use that could use the upgrade since it fixes the digital packet signing issue that existed in 10.4. Unfortunately, with it taking 5-15 minutes to log in, if at all, and binding be hit or miss, I’m rolling out the new machines in 10.4. Everything else will have to wait until they get this issue fixed.
That’s just one issue, but it just shows that changing over to 10.5 isn’t as simple as “it’s better, so everyone should use it!” It’s good in certain ways, and infuriating and troublesome in others.
Circle