“Less than five months after going public with plans to immediately start replacing its Windows-based PCs with Macs, Auto Warehousing Co. was forced to push back the project by more than a month. That was last December. The reason was not a lack of money, manpower or executive support. Rather, what stymied the project were protests from workers and objections from customers who perceived the technology switch as unnecessarily costly,” Julia King reports for Compterworld.
“‘I didn’t see this coming at all,’ says Dale Frantz, CIO of the Tacoma, Wash.-based company. ‘We never before had any of the workforce question our technological initiatives.’ But with the Mac project, ‘there was a perception that the equipment was much more expensive than traditional Windows PCs and that we were purchasing Lamborghini-level equipment with the company’s profits,’ he says,” King reports.
“AWC’s customers had similar concerns, raising questions about whether the technology migration might trigger increases in service rates. Computerworld story about AWC’s technology migration plans was published, both he and CEO Stephen Seher received a flood of phone calls and e-mails with questions, positive and negative comments, and even an anonymous death threat,” King reports.
MacDailyNews Take: Reports of a death threat should not be at all surprising: The combination of “Stockholm Syndrome” and “cognitive dissonance” produces a victim who firmly believes the relationship is not only acceptable, but also desperately needed for their survival.
King continues, “Employees wanted to know whether money that could go toward salary increases or other benefits was being diverted to what they perceived as a pricey high-tech project. Customers worried that the cost of the project would be passed on to them. AWC’s bankers wanted more details to determine whether switching to a new technology made sound business sense… A few key people were very anti-Apple, though they couldn’t articulate why. ‘They just didn’t want to switch,’ Frantz says.”
King reports, “As Frantz saw it, fully disclosing costs was the best way to do that. He spent the next month explaining to everyone who would be affected the many reasons for the technology swap. Among those is the more than $1.82 million the company calculates it will save over the next three years.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Old myths die hard. But, die they do.
The story is about unfounded perceptions of Macintosh costs, yet the Headline at Computer World screams:
“Mac switch revisited: An enterprise PC shop’s move to Apple isn’t as easy as expected
Auto Warehousing Co.’s switch from PCs to Macs is proving more painful than expected.”
Would anyone just reading the headline understand the actual foundation of the story? Of course not. They would scan that and say to themselves, “Of course, enterprises shouldn’t waste their time on Macs.”
Once again we see sensational headlines that misrepresent the article content. Why don’t they let the writers create their own headlines? I’m sure if they had the headline would have been far more accurate.
Alright folks! Let’s here some stories from the MDN crowd about how a company saved money in the long term by switching to the Macintosh platform.
Sillicone Valley? What’s that? A whole valley of strip clubs?
Wow!!! What a day. 2 posts by Ampar that aren’t jokes and 1 by TowerTone with a sexual reference!
Are you guys muscling in on my turf???
“Why don’t they let the writers create their own headlines?”
Because the editors and their advertisers ride the same FUD train.
@Chrissy
Seems there’s a Bozo on this bus…
“Seems there’s a Bozo on this bus…”
Nice Firesign Theatre reference.
“Before the beginning, there was this turtle. And the turtle was alone. And he looked around, and he saw his neighbor, which was his mother. And he lay down on top of his neighbor, and behold! she bore him in tears an oak tree, which grew all day and then fell over — like a bridge. And lo! underneath the bridge there came a catfish. And he was very big. And he was walking. And he was the biggest he had seen. And so were the fiery balls of this fish, one of which is the sun, and the other, they called the moon.”
nice article actually. read it. good un-emotional statement of the facts… particularly around the absurd costs involved with Licensing Microsoft technologies
My sister-in-law is on her second iMac. She started with a G5, and was constantly getting kernal panics. Had nothing hooked up, RAM replaced, HD replaced, Motherboard replaced, etc. 3 months later, the machine was still unusable. Lost more time than can be calculated on a machine that simply didn’t work, and as a freelance graphic designer, that was a problem.
Finally, after WAY too much bitching to Apple, she got a replacement. A brand new Intel iMac. Same problems! Kernal panics every other day. And this is a machine that has NOTHING connected to it. No external devices. Just the Adobe CS3 suite and Apple apps. Still couldn’t get a solid day’s work done. Not very cost effective.
Now, I am a Mac evangelist, and have been for 18 years. So I tried to help as best I could. But the more I dug on Apple’s support pages, the more I found that this seems to be a growing concern with iMacs. A lot of people with the same problems.
Now that being said, I can count the number of kernal panics I have had on one hand, and I have owned 10 Macs over the years. Plus, I have been using OSX since 10.0. And I own a G5 iMac that I use for my business, and have had no problems with it.
Bottom line: My concern is that as Apple starts selling more hardware, it is being forced to use manufacturing plants that are bigger, and more difficult to QC. In the past, Apple had the luxury of maintaining a close eye on quality, but as they grow and diversify, they may start to lose their grip on that.
I sincerely hope not.
Show me the money! I wonder if the 1.82 quoted included support cost savings, one of the biggest benefits of switching to Macs…
Not always:
My missus had the same problem with her 3-year-old iMac… turns out I overlooked checking that she only had 8 percent free space on her HD. Kernel panics galore. Got a new machine out of though.
TexasAg03, et al:
Strewth… I was being doubly-ironic, and you guys didn’t get it. My talent’s wasted on here.
The real-world logic of staying with Windows is so bizzar that it just gets me all knotted up inside. In the first place, Macs don’t really cost more, and if they do, it’s not much for a comparably priced pc competitor – we all know this 1000 times over by now.
But what we don’t hear near enough of is MS’s very best kept secret – the cost of owning the damn thing. It is really freakin expensive to own computers that run Windows. Even the cost of operating our Macs started going up when the 3 or 4 people who felt they needed to be able to run Windows started doing that. At the budget cutting behest of the IT dept., at least one of those individuals has worked things out so that they no longer need to use Windows at all, and according our self-confessed-Windows-lovin IT manager, the cost of operating that workstation went down over a three month period.
If you’re not getting the message, then here it is spelled out: W-i-n-d-o-w-s i-s B-A-D n-e-w-s, for a cost conscious company. In companies where I have initiated Mac usage this has been true 100% of the time: If you carefully track your IT costs at the desktop level for one year, you WILL see a cost savings when you switch to the Macintosh – period, case closed. That is a scientifically verified fact.
Here’s a cost saving testimony about keeping your equipment updated in general: We talked our reticent Chief Engineer into upgrading our Dual G5s when we came to him showing the number of hours per week we would save in render time, and how that directly translated into real dollars saved because workstation operators (Graphics and Video) would spend more time actually moving forward with each project. (We have not yet talked our engineers into the idea of render farms, but we’re working on it).
Literally, just in render time alone, one fully loaded MacPro pays for itself in real dollars saved per project, in 3-6 months – not to mention the fact that it cost our IT department virtually nothing to own Macs since they won’t support them. (We’re also working on changing that.)
OK, current testimony: When I started working here about seven years ago January, there was one Macintosh in the building. After purchasing a new digital audio console in the remote production truck, I specified a PowerBook G4 as a controlling front end for that hardware – so then we had two. After working for 3 years on the road I got transfered to video editing where we were using Premiere on Windows with a raided external SCSI III storage unit, (OMG, what a nightmare that was!). Long story short we had IT in our department on a daily basis.
My immediate supervisor had no problems with Macs so he suggested that I put together a proposal to get my workstation upgraded to a Mac based system just to see how that would go. Long story shorter, it worked. Six months later I was writing a proposal for four more Mac based workstations, and it’s escalated from there.
We now have a total of 16 Macintosh workstations between publishing, graphics arts and video/audio post production. Our overwhelmed and understaffed IT department is dancing in the streets because they spend about one hour per month supporting all of those machines. In the first year that we had four Macs running full time, and just figuring what we were spending on our Premiere workstations as a reference – what it costed this company to run ONE Windows based workstation for four months was slightly more than what it costed to run four Macs for 12 months. Compared to any Windows machine, Macs often pay for themselves inside of the first six months. I’ve been in the professional workforce since 1985 and I’ve seen this time and time again – and without fail. Once you see it for yourself it tends to leave you speechless as to why anyone in their right mind would ever want to use Windows in the enterprise workforce.
The reality is there are a great many people who hate Apple. Some of them cannot articulate why, they just do. Many of them will never change.
I used to be a systems engineer at a company that had about 120 macs (OS9 days). Our IT dept was two people. That’s two people in total. One to handle the networking and servers, the other (me) to handle all the desktops. And I even had a lot of freetime.
Well, the company decided to switch from macs to PC. We had to hire an ADDITIONAL three people just to support the PCs. That’s one network guy and FOUR desktop support people. Of course all the users welcomed the PCs as they were new hardware and seemed “so much faster” than the 3 or 4 year old macs they were working on.
Kernal panics? I only saw them when HD space was limited and I was running apps that taxed the VM used on the drives too much. Capturing HDTV with my eyeTV seemed to be the biggest offender. A upgrade to a decent amount of memory (from 2gb to 10gb in a MacPro) and keeping my boot drive clear of clutter and everything is fine now. Haven’t seen a single one.
It’s Unix folks, get some decent memory in there. 512 is not going to cut it for long.
‘not always’ – I’ve owned 5 OSX macs over the past 6 years, and serviced another 5 at least for others, and sold macs, with over 20 different floor models on display, no kernel panics in sight. Although we both offer only anecdotal evidence, mac still offers a extremely high reliability rate. I also owned 2 PCs which crapped out within about a year, after only being used for gaming, I only run macs now. I did witness a dead superdrive on a brand new g5 mac though, but was replaced immediately at an Apple store under AppleCare. Kernel panics are usually software issues, I would have run fsck, disk utility, Disk Warrior, then Tech Tools. Also, avoiding Limewire is good too, it’s the only program I’ve known to totally screw up a mac.
How can Apple justify the entire company run Mac OX? Do you think they run crap ‘ruindous’ only because it is cheap like sheet?
I could say any number of things about those who are reluctant to switch. The employees, the customers, the creditors(!), but I won’t. I’ll just forward the article to my eldest … he’s the one who “reverse-switched” not long after Jobs was canned. (are we allowed to say that?) Now … he had a couple of good-enough reasons for his switching, but no good reason at all for drinking the M$ kool-aide. I can give him a little slack with the fact that he needs to run Visio for work, but he has totally lost sigh of the many things that have changed over the past decade.
Macs are running UNIX, now. A REAL OS.
Macs now cost less than equivalent PC builds (but more than strippers)
Macs can run Linux via a couple different options. (but … why?)
Macs can run Windows the same way. (to run Visio?)
5-year-old Macs can run the latest OSX (unlike a like PC with Vista)
I’m starting to forget valid points … whatever.
Anyway … if my own son is so crippled (his younger brother – also over 30 – is a Mac man and their sister can switch with ease) then I should keep quiet.
Sigh!
Two things. They are having to switch from Exchange/Outlook to Mail.app (ugh) and totally rewritting their software.. switching from Powerbuilder to Java 6.0 (ugh++).
@MacChilta…
huh?
Of course it’s cheaper to go with MACs–nobody else wants those pieces of crap. Supply and demand, folks. $1.82 million’s a bargain for the superior ease-of-use and security offered by Microsoft’s fantastic Windows Vista. You can’t even play games on a MAC.
Your potential. Our passion.
Myths?
Your potential. Our passion.™
Hey PC troll: Eat Mr. Peabody’s real world dust.
I notice you have no answer, except to quote empty Micros**t slogans.
Well, I have a story of my own:
At the studio I worked at, my boss decided to get Dull ‘workstations’ for everyone, upon his IT brother-in-law’s suggestion.
Boy was that ever a bad move.
The butt-ugly Wintel boxes were obsolete as soon as they arrived and we endured crash after crash and many many calls to IT. When the last one arrived in the studio, there was an audible groan when they saw the box (there’s no worse feeling then watching a UPS guy dragging a Dull box into your workplace). This one was given the working name POS (aptly) and set about infuriating anyone unfortunate enough to be lumped with using it.
Meanwhile, we got two MacBook Pro laptops. No issues, no IT needed. They worked day in and day out while at any given time two out of the seven Dull boxes are either down altogether or in need of repair.
The wretched 8lb XPS laptops were taken on school shoots, but the equally abominable PC lab software we were duped into buying ($900 or so) crashed so often that the shooting got behind and the kids names had to be entered manually afterwards, which took one person three weeks to do.
Do I need to go on? You idiot PC trolls that come here have NO COMEBACK for this type of thing, because it is based on real world experience.
Well I have my own business now, and it’s being started without a single Micros**t product of any kind. I don’t give a flip what the rest of the world does, I’M NOT staring at that freaking dog’s dinner they call an OS all day and Micros**t is NOT getting a penny of my hard-earned ever again.
Potential? Passion? M$ wouldn’t know Passion if it got up and bit them in the face.
Glad you got round to posting this article MDN, as I sent it to you a while back!
The combination of “Microsoft Mafia” and “Stockholm Syndrome” explains the catastrophic Windows/Office dominance.
“You can’t even play games on a MAC.”
WTF?!
Our company is 100% Mac. We use Macs for work not play.
PlayStation/Wii are for games. No Mafiasoft needed.