Jonathan Blum, “tech guru” for Fortune Small Business, asks “Is it time to consider moving your small business to Macs?”
Blum writes, “First, you should know that I’m no Apple fanatic. I’ve used the gear steadily since the Reagan era; the early Apple II and the computer-as-Cuisinart lookalike that was the original Mac were both college tools of mine. But overall, I have found Apples, as lovely as they are for certain applications, just not worth the hassle for most small businesses.”
MacDailyNews Take: Typical ham-handed set-up that attempts to establish impartiality: I’m no Apple fanatic, but I’ve used their products for a long time, so, even though no iMac model ever made even remotely resembles a Cusinart, get ready to believe the mountain of bullshit I’m about to shovel.
Blum continues, “Still, even I have to admit that the latest Apple line of desktops and laptop computers is flashing some serious small-business form. Apple computers now run on the same basic electronics guts – Intel chips and the like – as any PC using the Microsoft operating systems. Peripheral support for Apple is strong: Every gadget vendor wants a piece of that sexy iPhone/iPod pie.”
MacDailyNews Take: Shouldn’t a real “tech guru” implicitly understand “Apple computers” are referred to as “Macs?” We ask, not only because Blum does it repeatedly and awkwardly throughout his piece, but also because the last “Apple computer” rolled off the assembly line in December 1992. Now, can someone please explain how a printer or scanner or whatever peripheral maker is getting “a piece of that sexy iPhone/iPod pie” by writing Mac drivers?
Blum continues, “Many smart shops I chat with are dumping their Windows machines for Macs. Take Jaffe Associates, a Washington, D.C., marketing and business-strategy consultancy. This 25-person firm recently unplugged its traditional Windows server architecture to install a similar system from none other than Apple. The company considered upgrading its aging Windows XP terminal server but endured Microsoft sticker shock when it calculated the cost of deploying collaborative software: Chief Operating Officer Shani Magosky got a quote for $100,000. Then she priced Apple technology for same functionality and found she could build a similar system for about half the price… To see if Steve Jobs’ brainchild really does have game for the average small business, I ordered up an iMac several months ago and installed it in my little digital world. “
MacDailyNews Take: So, instead of stopping with a nice example of how a smart person dumps Windows for Macs and saves a lot of money, Blum proceeds to conduct his own experiment to see just how much meaningless nonsense a cretin can generate for Fortune Small Business.
Blum continues, “My verdict? Though Apple computers can produce excellent results for small business, expect issues: Macs remain a niche product. No matter what you do with a Mac, you have to deal Apple’s peculiar vision of all things computerish. First off, the packaging is seriously overdone: ‘Designed by Apple in California’ is prominent on the box. Like I care.”
MacDailyNews Take: Well, there you have it. Because Macs come in award-winning packaging that prominently displays the words, “Designed by Apple in California,” small business should expect “issues.”
Blum continues, “Why should locating the ‘on’ switch be such struggle? Just stick the thing where I, and my employees, can find it: right up front.”
MacDailyNews Take: We hereby apologize; we had no idea Fortune Small Business was employing the mentally-challenged as a tech writer. Jonny is obviously “special.”
Jonny continues, “As promised, setup was a two-click, plug-and-play affair: Plunk the iMac on the desk, plug it in and turn it on. Setting up peripherals and Web access was also dead easy. But – as ever, with Apple boxes – there were not enough USB ports. A USB hard drive had to be dumped in favor of Ethernet enablement unit.”
MacDailyNews Take: “Ethernet enablement unit?” Jonny, all iMacs come with built-in 10/100/1000BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet via RJ-45 connectors. There’s no need for an “Ethernet enablement unit,” Mr. “Tech Guru.” Match the ends of the wires with the holes on the iMac, Jonny. Spend a bit more time with your Sesame Street shape cube before setting up your next computer, okay?
Jonny continues, “No question, running native 64-bit Apple code on the Mac is blazing… But again, there are issues: Offsetting all this speed are some curious features clearly not aimed at the average small business. The desktop is divided into quadrants that exist beyond the screen’s edge. Only with some complex keyboard commands can I slide from one to another. All the goofy Apple-centric commands leave users trained on PCs constantly fighting to parse out what the control, option and command keys do. And there is the very odd mouse. Apple devotees swear by the touch-sensitive shell of the ‘Mighty Mouse,’ but its top left- and right-click buttons still look an awful lot like just one.”
MacDailyNews Take: Jonny, the ability to conceptualize virtual screens and mouse buttons requires an IQ above 70.
Jonny continues, “The real eye-rolling winner is Time Machine, quite possibly the silliest operating system extension in history. Must I really sit through a full round of special effects – the desktop slides away to reveal some mysterious star in full supernova disappearing into infinity behind my various back ups – just to find a what I said to a client in a lost e-mail? Honestly.”
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, by all means, replace an intuitive visual representation with a typically opaque Microsoft dialog box festooned with badly-labeled tabs that offers only text descriptions and buttons. That’ll help you more quickly find your files. Most people would appreciate things being thought out to such a degree and made simpler (and – gasp! – more fun) for them. Not Jonny the “tech guru.”
Jonny continues, “On balance, is there money to be made with Apples? Depends… But other than raw speed, I had a very difficult time measuring any quantifiable improvement over the PC for average business chores – that kind that ultimately affect your bottom line.”
MacDailyNews Take: How quickly poor Jonny forgets his own perfectly measurable and quantifiable example of Jaffe Associates’ Chief Operating Officer Shani Magosky and how “she priced Apple technology for same functionality and found she could build a similar system for about half the price.”
Jonny continues, “Yes, Apples can be easier to use, but with some things, like as syncing your Apple to not-Apple portable devices such as BlackBerrys and smartphones, expect real trouble. I and my assistants had terrible problems getting all of our company programs to work properly.”
MacDailyNews Take: Color us wholly unsurprised that poor Jonny and his attendants had terrible problems syncing their ancient and outclassed mobile devices. Jonny seems to know that Macs can also slum it with Windows, so why doesn’t they just fire up that ancient and outclassed OS to sync their ancient and outclassed devices until they can afford iPhones?
Jonny continues, “Yes, more businesses can now go to Macs – I would say they now make sense for maybe 20 companies out of 100, up from just 5 a few years back. But for the rest of us – particularly those that need basic computing and basic features – Apple is still more expensive and simply not worth the integration headaches for the average small shop.”
Full article, Think Before You Click™, here.
MacDailyNews Take: How fitting that Jonny ends his FUDfest with a random concoction of nonsense numbers and then caps it off with an outright contradiction of the very real-world example he cites, Jaffe Associates, which shaved half of their costs by dumping Windows for Mac.
In all seriousness, the fear is palpable. Expect the volume and vehemence (along with the ridiculousness) of the FUD to increase as Apple Macintosh continues to take share from Windows PCs.
[Thanks to virtually every MacDailyNews Reader on the planet for the heads up.]
All singing aside, this guy really is stupid. The desktop is broken up into quadrants????? THIS is a tech guru? Does he not understand what virtual desktops are? He obviously has 0 understanding of anything that we call computers, whether Mac or PC. His terminology leaves much to be questioned.
♫♪♫ Fortune Small Business hires morons. ♪♫♪
Tell the editors what you think:
http://money.cnn.com/popups/2005/biz2/email/emailsend.html?send_to=fsb_mail@timeinc.com&article=http://money.cnn.com/2008/05/29/smallbusiness/macs_small_biz.fsb/index.htm
Or here:
fsb_mail@timeinc.com
Jonathan, you’re fired!
Go on, get your things.
Oh, and leave the iMac here.
This article is not about Macs and PCs. This article is about Mac OS X and Windows. It makes no difference what you choose, AMD or Intel, who your case is made by, Asus or Liang Li, or who your built your video card, nVidia or ATI. Hardware is not what users use… they use software. The bridge between that silicon and that person is the software. These tech idiots have no clue about the heart of the issue.
You can buy Dell. You can by Asus. You can buy Toshiba… it doesn’t matter. They all run Windows, and Windows is a flop. The real question is whether to use Mac OS X or Windows. The niggle here is that the former requires an Apple built product, while the latter, well it can run on any joe-shmoe system… quality is not an assurance.
The lays of the world can ogle Apple products, but its the interface that deserves the majority of the credit. It is Mac OS X that should get the accolades… and that’s something these idiots (like Blum) have completely missed.
WS,
Who you calling a niggle?!
@Vague Nomenclature
Good catch, Bum appears to be looking to dethrone Enderle (that should be good sport).
@HMCIV
I think ‘guru’ is the appropriate term. A guru is a spiritual leader. Everything this guys says is based on faith & mysticism.
Some vague understanding of nomenclature in that. Guru’s are about communicating with one’s spirit, faith and mysticism is religious fare, like seriously old much edited books, invisible ‘friends’ and voices in the head. Not voices in their own heads, alleged voices in the heads of their leaders.
@January 24, 1984
Must be a drag to have a low IQ.
Depends what you do with it, IQ is just one measure. Some people with low IQs do very well in terms considered conventional and desirable, for corroboration I cite Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates, Mickey-Mouse Dell, GWB.
@MDN
Keep on doing what you are doing.
This guy’s got an ass for a brain.
Email sent to editor of CNNMoney:
“CNNMoney should be absolutely ashamed of itself for publishing this article by Mr. Blum.
It isn’t worth my time to list all the evidence for the opinion stated above, with one exception: how seriously should a reader take Mr. Blum’s drivel when his basis is that in a day or two he can perform an assessment of Macs for business use that can be compared to the depth of investigation Jaffe Assoc. almost certainly performed before making their decision to switch?
Suggest you peruse the web to see how Mr. Blum’s arguments are playing there. Not well, I can assure you.
Any article that ends “Windows Vista, properly installed and used in tandem with Web-based productivity tools, is a powerful, powerful alternative.” should be accompanied by a disclaimer that Blum isn’t being compensated by Microsoft for his opinions.
But then, I realize it may not be possible to state that.”
Predrag wrote: “If you plug in your keyboard and a mouse on a Mac, you still have three more ports for your devices. The only snag is that the other port on your keyboard has very little power, and is essentially USB 1.1 (i.e slow), while the other two on the iMac are fast(er).”
@Predrag: that is old incorrect information. It was true of the white Jay-Leno-chinned iMacs. But the current Aluminum iMacs have USB 2.0 ports in the keyboard.
I wonder how much Microsoft paid him to write this drivel?
For anyone using a desk with a grommet hole in it, and in need of a USB hub but unwilling to clutter it up with the fugly crap that a lot of manufacturers have been making, check out the Belkin In-Desk USB hub.
http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Product_Id=369283
They have others available via Amazon, but that one happens to be the nicest. And it was even reviewed kindly.
I just discovered Blum’s tech credentials. Not bad — he stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night…
There are two more USB ports on the keyboard (non-Bluetooth).
I can’t figure out whether the “divided into quadrants” thing is a statement of pure stupidity, or if it’s just a badly conceived attempt at sowing confusion while retaining some level of plausible deniability. I’m leaning towards the former, but then, these FUDsters never expect to be called to account, so maybe it’s the latter… Hm.
i love the left handed aside “if you need basic computing don’t buy a mac” this idiot really just needs a calculator not a computer. I’m forced to use both at work (mac’s do not play well with Cad mills yet) but i have to sometimes send some weighty files i tried to zip one on the pc and was greeted with ” you have 40 uses then you have to buy this software or remove it and all iterations of it from your hard drive” my mac zips them for free add another 40 dollars to that companies savings!
I read through Jonathan Blum’s assessment regarding Macs in small businesses, and I found it to be disingenuous and misleading. Early in the article, Mr. Blum describes the results of Jaffe Associates’ Shani Magorsky, who was able to ‘build a similar system (to a $100,000 Microsoft system) for about half the price.’ Then, in his summation, he declares ‘Apple is still more expensive and simply not worth the integration headaches for the average small shop.’ While I certainly understand Blum had difficulties setting up his single iMac computer (his problems seemed atypical of the standard computer users’: his distaste for Apple’s slogan, his inability to find the On switch, and some peculiar troubles with the USB ports and an ‘Ethernet enablement unit’), it reads more as a ‘What I Couldn’t Figure Out on My Summer Vacation’ piece than an actual review of Macs in a small business place. Where were the details from the Jaffe Associates’ experience? Where was any discussion of Boot Camp or the other methods of running Windows XP on an Intel Mac, one of the major selling points of using Macs these days? This article was not a very helpful piece for anyone considering a Mac-based small business, myself included. You might reconsider the moniker ‘tech guru’ for Mr. Blum; it lends him more credence than he earns from his article.
About the apparently insufficient number of USB ports:
– since the guy is coming from Windows, it is no surprise he owns a disgustingly large number of USB peripherals.
– nobody seems to realize that USB performance drops dramatically with the number of USB devices on the same bus, especially in the presence of USB 1 or otherwise slow devices
– why is it that I see a string resurgence of Firewire external disks (combined with USB and more recently, eSATA)? For that exact reason, namely. USB sucks: even FireWire 400 is typically 3 times faster than USB in real world circumstances; Firewire performance doesn’t go down under severe loads as it does for USB.
Time to get rid of a few USB peripherals and to upgrade to modern interfaces!
What hope do you Apple fanbois have that more PC users will ever switch to Mac if your cumulative voices are inconsequential compared to the ranting of one single moron?
Seriously, what the hell are you doing wrong that even isolated morons, idiots, and twits can convince tens of thousands of people that buying a PC is better than buying a Mac?
Your doing one lousy job, people, when even “morons” can out smart all Apple fanbois.
blum@blumsday.com
“Windows Vista, properly installed and used in tandem with Web-based productivity tools, is a powerful, powerful alternative.”
And. . . Resistance is feudal.
Ok people. Lets not start a MOB scene here.!!!!!!
You guys are right, this guy is a moron. But for the great part, and MDN, you totally forgot about this.
Go to the article and read the comments.!!!!
Read the comments!!!!!
Almost to a person, they all pointed out how this guy is just dumb. And that the magazine should chastize him. These are great readings.
So, MDN, remember to check out the comments too.
Just a thought.
en
@He, he.
Is ‘fanboi’ French Canadian?
“In the Middle Ages, lords and vassals lived in a futile system.”
http://www.s-anand.net/calvinandhobbes.html#19901026
Here’s why I don’t like “Apples:”
I tried loading Leopard on my Mac SE and had to trim the disc just
to get it to fit in the slot!!!!
Theeeeen, the damned thing wouldn’t even load, so now I’m back
where I was using OS 7.
‘Designed in California” my goober peas!