“Mac skills have long been seen as superfluous for IT professionals; Apple platforms are rarely used in medium and large enterprises, and not even the release of the OS X operating system chipped away at Windows’ claim on the IT department. Yet some observers feel that this is set to change,” Deb Perelman reports for eWeek.
“Between October 2007 and January 2008, two dozen researchers at IBM participated in an internal pilot program designed to investigate the possibility of migrating employees to the Mac platform. At the end of the trial, 86 percent of the testers asked to continue using their Macs, leading IBM to plan to expand the pilot to 100 users by the end of 2008,” Perelman reports.
“‘I have been a true PC stalwart for two-plus decades, but after trying Vista, I’m ready for a change,’ commented one pilot program participant,” Perelman reports.
“But who will support this change? A common conception is that the IT department will not embrace Macs willingly,” Perelman reports. “‘There is almost a religious belief by existing IT staff in the Windows religion, and it’s a symbiotic relationship: They keep getting Microsoft certifications and they keep telling their bosses to continue buying Windows,’ Technology Business Research analyst Ezra Gottheil told eWEEK.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Jim H.” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: It’s not a “religious belief,” it’s a mental illness; a combination of Stockholm Syndrome and Cognitive Dissonance, to be precise. Inflict enough pain on someone and you can reduce them to sniveling sycophants in no time. It’s the Microsoft Way™. More on that here: Defending Windows over Mac a sign of mental illness.
As for IT’s willingness: CEOs, who runs the company, you or the IT guy? It’s your job to make the decisions and it’s the IT guy’s job to implement your decisions that relate to technology. You need to educate yourself instead of relying on someone with their own, possibly hidden, agendas to make extremely important technology decisions for your company. Most of you could be saving a lot of money right now, but you aren’t, because you’ve delegated an important and expensive portion of your company’s decision-making process to people who, frankly, in our experience, aren’t capable of making good, sound, strategic, long-term decisions. Most IT guys (and we know many) are not open-minded enough to be able to consider new, better, more efficient, more effective options that would benefit your company. In fact, most IT guys we’ve met will throw up road blocks and repeat myths until they’re blue in the face simply in order to avoid change. Especially change that might make their department less critical and smaller. Bottom line: most of you CEOs have given the IT guy way too much power. It’s time to take it back.
I love it when Apple fanboys pretend to be IT experts. That’s why the Mac Pros at work have been out of action since some smart cookie tried to put Leopard on then. It’s a good thing they don’t do anything real important on the Macs, that’s what the Windows and Linux machines are for.
You can’t say your company is 100 % Mac if your company comprises of one person (you) and nobody pays you for you work. What you’re saying is you’re unemployed so you play with you Mac in your garage all day.
Quite.
“Will your company’s IT department ever willingly embrace Apple Macs?”
In the case of my company, somewhere around ‘never’, at a rough guess.
“I love it when Apple fanboys pretend to be IT experts. That’s why the Mac Pros at work have been out of action since some smart cookie tried to put Leopard on then. It’s a good thing they don’t do anything real important on the Macs, that’s what the Windows and Linux machines are for.”
Yeah, it’s comical, really, as if people who think their Mac is the IT infrastructure have any real clue about what’s involved in running IT operations for organizations with hundreds or thousands of users.
Talk about coincidence. Just yesterday one of the web marketing employees was frustrated by a wireless network connectivity issue on her issued ThinkPad. She said we should just get Macs in marketing. I looked at her and asked how her Leopard upgrade went on her personal Mac laptop (already knowing the answer) and she said, “Actually, the upgrade broke all my iPhoto and wireless connectivity so I had to start from a fresh load.” She also had to upgrade her Verizon router firmware for Leopard.
As for the ThinkPad…it was just too far away from the Cisco WAP. Turned the corner and it came back on.
Funny story…
I work as a preofessor at a University on the East Coast (Mystery, mystery…). I had issues getting on their WiFi last semester, because it was all ghetto.
I asked the IT department to help me deal with this issue. Being a faculty, you would think you can get a little help here and there…
Well, how great was my surprise when this over weighted, bald guy told me that he did not even want to touch a mac, and that the IT department did not deal with this.
I asked him who dealt with the coupld hundreds that the University has in the iLab, but he did not answer, and left my office…
So, bottom line is: The IT at my University are anti-mac, and still in the middle-ages when concerning computers. The saddest thing is that the IT team does not even update softwares on their PC. I have been having issues with a couple of professors I work with, sending them eMails with .docX documents, and they cannot open it, because they still run freaking Office 2004!
I have one word to say: LAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMEEEEE
My company won’t. They once considered using blackberries but decided to stick with their beloved jazjams. I doubt they know what the iphone is capable of. Thanks to the loophole of me being a graphic artist I have the only mac in the building. I wonder what the IT guys are up to? It’s been so long since i had to call them.
@ Another IT Guy…
That was a terrible story.
“Actually, the upgrade broke all my iPhoto and wireless connectivity so I had to start from a fresh load.”
Bullshit.
Apple stock is going through the roof again. Let the IT Ctowd keep their windows machines if they want. Live and let live. If any of you have the stocks widget instaled you can watch go up by the second, just set a hot corner and keep refreshing it.
I meant Crowd. Damn my fat fingers.
@DaveH: why is the single-vendor lock-in of requiring everything to run Windows better than the single-vendor lock-in of requiring everything to run OS X on Mac hardware?
This is something I don’t understand. I mean, I can understand requiring multiple competing vendors — it’s a way to ensure that there are no sweetheart deals and the business is covered in case a vendor goes out of business.
But Microsoft is the sole vendor and sole source for Windows. So it seems to me that if single-vendor lock-in is prohibited, it ought to prohibit Microsoft software as well.
@Mac User
That’s a good point, and definitely the reason why more and more IT departments are moving their internally built applications away from Microsoft dependency and onto open standards. If Microsoft then get heavy, there is the option to remove Microsoft technologies off the corporate desktop/server estate, one by one if necessary. In a lot of companies it is already happening, with Firefox replacing IE for instance.
But what businesses don’t want to do is swap a software vendor lock-in for both a software and hardware one. OSX adoption would mean just that.
Macs are not the IT pariahs they were once viewed as, as other posters above testify to, but unless Apple license OSX to other hardware vendors I can’t see it getting widespread enterprise adoption, and despite what some Mac people think that’s actually the right decision.
“”Actually, the upgrade broke all my iPhoto and wireless connectivity so I had to start from a fresh load.”
Bullshit.”
Pull your head out of Jobs’ ass. Total truth. Wouldn’t have to make it up…this is old news:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7123150
“Users suggested a variety of solutions, including applying the post-Leopard update Apple said fixes log-in issues as well as a vaguely-stated “connecting to some 802.11b/g wireless networks ” problem. Other ideas ranged from finding and possibly removing the “AppleAirport2.kext” file to toggling IPv6 on/off.
Commonalities between users reporting the problem were difficult to define. Some, for instance, said they had used the “Upgrade” option to move to Leopard, while others said they had picked “Archive and Install” or even wiped their drives clean before installing Leopard from scratch.”
Just because Jobs approved it doesn’t mean it’s perfect. And it doesn’t mean it’s bad or even unsuitable for the enterprise environment…except that Apple doesn’t care about the enterprise. And who can blame them? Does Apple really want to invest and implement 24-hour corporate support call centers and 4-hour on-site response times? I don’t think so, but that’s what’s required in an IT environment.
Your story is still a bullshit story.