Wingfield reports, “This is the double life many people lead: yesterday’s technology for work, today’s technology for everything else. The past decade has brought awesome innovations to the marketplace—Internet search, the iPhone, Twitter and so on—but consumers, not companies, embrace them first and with the most gusto… For a look at how sharp the divide between work and home can be, consider my experience. The Wall Street Journal gives me a laptop with Windows XP, an operating system I found satisfying when it came out eight years ago but that lacks a lot of modern touches, like a speedy file-search function. My home computer, meanwhile, is a two-year-old iMac running the Leopard version of Apple’s Macintosh operating system. Among other virtues, it’s got a search function called Spotlight that lets me track down files in a flash.”
Wingfield reports, “Some companies have decided the best solution is to start giving workers what they want. [Recently] executives [at Kraft Foods] began to worry that the company’s technology policies were preventing employees from staying in step with trends… So, the IT department stopped blocking access to consumer Web sites, and the company started a stipend program for smart phones: Workers get an allowance every 18 months to buy a phone of their choosing. (Over 60% picked iPhones.) Kraft has also started a pilot program to let some of its employees pick their own computer. One catch: Employees who choose Macs are expected to solve technical problems by consulting an online discussion group at Kraft, rather than going through the help desk, which deals mainly with Windows users.”
Full article here.
Careful what you wish for. There was a Mac zealot at the last company I worked for that fitted out a lab with 5-6 Mac Pros. When he upgraded to Leopard his CVS server died and he was unable to fix some compatibility problems that crept into the software he wrote.
The lab was useless for months until he fixed it.
He didn’t lose his job or anything but it made him and his Macs look bad.
Too true.
Just this afternoon, I had to find a document on an XP box for a colleague at a nonprofit I volunteer at.
Oh the expired crapware that kept popping up after I logged in. Then the “My Documents” BS. And so on.
In an instant it made me wish I was on my Mac.
Ahem…
@ZevFan
“They are not the same thing and, um, makes the writer appear to be uneducated.”
Here, ‘makes’ is implied as ‘it makes’ where the ‘it’ can be silent, and so it is in this case. However, when you have the ‘and,um, makes…’ then really you are in danger of mistakenly leading the readers to adjoin the subject ‘They’ with the 2nd parallel object starting with the verb ‘makes,’ which, ahem, is less than ideal.
It is akin to suggesting, ‘they are not the same thing AND they <makes> the writer appear to be uneducated.’
Maybe a ‘slightly different’ grammatical approach could paint this less ambiguous:
“They are not the same thing and, IMO, not knowing the difference makes the writer appear as uneducated.”
I’m no grammar police, I just play one on MDN.
As always… Active-X, Sharepoint, .asp, .net…. get the picture?
IT at Kraft should be worried, when management figures out they can get rid of all the IT staff just by forcing their employees to use Macs.
krquet:
…”I’m no grammar police, I just play one on MDN.”
Well, that performance was certainly a tour-de-force!
I often play grammar Nazi here, but you definitely have me beat!
Kevin, I figured as much. My neighbor who works in a secret/secure Navy facility has to deal with 6 year old Windows crap. He has all his passwords on post-it notes on his screen, for want of a password generator such as 1PassWord.
Try Smart Scroll on your Mac. I wouldn’t be without it.
“Maybe a ‘slightly different’ grammatical approach could paint this less ambiguous: “
ambiguously?
“Unfortunately, good IT is to work behind the scenes, putting pieces together so that users can solve problems for themselves. Bad IT is to always determine what the solution will be before the problems are even presented.”
This is largely true.
“The result? If you practice good IT, the executives think you aren’t doing anything and cut your department. If your IT organization is awful you’ll get a lot more face time with the decision-makers and your budget will skyrocket.”
This is completely untrue. Any decent IT organization has concrete metrics to measure uptime, application availability and user satisfaction, to say nothing of selling internally-developed IT services to outside clients. My annual bonuses have nothing to do with shilling for M$ or Adobe or SAP, and everything to do with bringing new services and functionality to the organization that definitively and empirically support the business goals.
Whether or not a user prefers an aluminum unibody Mac over a carbon-fiber ThinkPad or SL Finder over W7 Explorer is not really in the equation.
“Whether or not a user prefers an aluminum unibody Mac over a carbon-fiber ThinkPad or SL Finder over W7 Explorer is not really in the equation.”
Typical IT BS.
Yeah, don’t you wish employers with Apple computers would add “Macs used here” in the job description so that you’d know if you were going to have to work in Hell or not on a PC? Hate getting to an interview and finding out its all PC.
Bet it would help load the the applicant pool with more intelligent, productive people.
Hate to bust your bubble guys, but I make a very good living doing IT work on Macs. The idea that all of us in IT would be out of business b/c Macs never have issues makes me laugh. I’d guess I could become a Genius at the Apple Store, but since Mac’s never have issues, I’d be out of work there as well.
One of the IT Department’s jobs is to lab-test every OS and variant that walks through the door, wishing to be installed. XP got this treatment, as did SP1 and 2. Can you imagine doing this for Panther, then Tiger, then Leopard, THEN Snow Leopard? You’d be six months behind the curve … the day AFTER your latest update. Oh, I forgot … 10.5.0, 10.5.1, 10.5.2, 10.AUGH! At least with Windows you only have to tack down the latest malware!
Please stop mistaking I’m a PC for a ZT wanna-be. He isn’t. I’m not even sure he understands how mistaken he is.
It comes down to this. Most people use their computers at work to send e-mails, type form letters or run an excel spreadsheet. For these purposes, all they need is a cheap computer. Apple does not make anything in or for that market.
A similar question might be, “Why do workers have to watch the company training videos on a 20″ SD CRD TV, when they have 50” Plasmas at home.
@Quad Core
Because your training video lasts 60 minutes and your computer is something you use 4-8 hours a day, every day?
You seriously need to go back and get your analogy GED.
I used PowerPoint in Win 7 for an hour today proofing a presentation. Crashed 5 times. It’s really night and day.
“[…] English is your second language or your stupid […]?”
My pick is _your_ stupid.
There’s a number of reasons that a Mac wouldn’t fit in in a PC -based organization.
1 – Active Directory – Controls authentication and access to network resources all from a single spot. The granularity of it is unmatched. Getting OSX to play nice with it is a complete pain in the ass. The document I downloaded from Apple was close to 50 pages thick. I read through it, took this to my boss and he decided that it wasn’t worth the hassle. You can add network shares to OSX but then you have to go to every machine in the business to add the folders. Not worthwhile and it drives up the cost of support.
2 – Centralized Management – Macs don’t allow you to remotely deployment of updates and software (aside from remote desktop-ing into the computer).
Our PC network lets us approve each and every update that gets deployed to our PC’s so we can do regression testing and make sure nothing gets broken.
Take a moment and look at your co-workers. Most people here are more technically literate than the normal population. Your IT group has to deal with every last non-computer savvy in the organization and make sure that they can come in and work. You people here are not the reason for the corporate policies. My special case mac users are in the same boat as most people here.
3 – Apple retires software and hardware a lot faster than the PC/Microsoft does. Companies have these things called budgets and most major purchases like computers become are leveraged against 4-5 years depending on the company. Keeping up with with Apple and it’s train of rapid obsolescence would make inventory OS management a joke.
As well, once the new OS comes out, Apple stops patching the previous iteration almost immediately.
If hackers started exploiting Leopard today, most people would be screwed. Companies that had bought PowerPC systems 3 years ago doubly so because those systems would become a permanent security liability.
As much as many people here would love to think so, the IT department isn’t your enemy. Their job is to make sure that you can do your work within the budgets set forth by the company. Frankly I would LOVE to be able to give everyone the computer they wanted (even the 3-4 people that are constantly asking me for Macs, sadly that just isn’t feasible.
It’s not that it’s impossible for any single install of OS X to ever have an issue, it’s that Windows has issues so frequently compared to… Well… Anything, that an IT department is always going to be busy just keeping it alive.
If a business switches to Macs, their IT department is suddenly going to be waaaaaaay less busy. Questions will be raised. Do we really need to keep all these guys on the payroll?
IT workers everywhere wouldn’t be out of a job, but A LOT would be. Kind of like how automation put a lot of factory workers out of a job.
…I’d be all over it like fur on a wookie.
Is that like a fat kid all over a Smartie?
Seriously though, there will soon be a day when an employer will let an employee choose what tools they bring to work much like the way employees choose what car to drive to work. This will happen through enterprise systems becoming more cloud based and platform independent.
From an enterprise perspective, its a case of establishing baseline standards for tools, easily accessible yet secure enterprise systems and moving the IT estate off the company books.
@Rask…
Spoken like a true IT person. You haven’t got the closest clue about the Mac.
1. Active Directory? Use Open Directory. It integrates very nicely. At one location, we have 850 Macs and 150 PC’s playing nice in an Active Directory dominated PC Centric company. AD is run from services in another building across town. All working very well together.
2. ARD Apple remote Desktop IS the same. It is Apple’s method of getting remote management. Why do bitch about not having remote management, except for the remote management from Apple? Are you even reading the crap you write?
3. Macs last. The OS is stable and updated often. even up to years after it is no longer sold OTC.
Try reading about something called TCO, or Total Cost of Ownership. Study after study talks about TCO, it’s something business really focuses on. Over 5 years, the TCO of using a Mac is WAY less than TCO of a PC. On order of about 2/3 the cost. I don’t have the links in front of me, but do remember that the big study that broke the news was from Business Week.
Forget the crap about “If Hackers…” why haven’t they? The first one to crack the MAC OS would be THE MOST FAMOUS hacker. EVER.
“…the IT department isn’t your enemy. Their job is to make sure that you can do your work…”
Another nod to Business Week: a few years ago, they ran the Bill Of Computer Users Rights. (I don’t work for them, really)
The Computer User has the right to a computer that works, allows them to do their job, and that the user has control over.
Why? Because it is NOT IT’s Job to get in the way. It is their job to, as you put it, “Their job is to make sure that you can do your work…”
@Bluefinpro:
Interesting about Open Directory. You do require an Apple OSX Server to implement it. How does it deal with stuff that modifies the AD schema like Exchange Upgrades or Windows Server 2008 or 2008R2 DC’s that are implemented?
I’m not as ignorant about Macs are you wish I was. I just don’t personally use it either at work or at home as a personal preference. (Windows Media Center on Windows 7 is my DRV and I use a 360 as an extender to my TV). I’ve fought with the Mac we have at the shop with Drivers for our Ricoh MFP’s, fought with Quark Version and the Apple Print Stack (having to use Safari and the CUPS daemon to configure network printing) and run into all sorts of major pain in the ass to get things working properly.
Once the machine is up in working properly though, we rarely have to deal with it at all.
We hare to deal with everyone, even the lowest common denominator users. They use Windows on a shit system at home and don’t see the need up upgrade that. Someone called me the other day wondering why her time was off during the daylight savings shift period (time between the old daylight saving vs new daylight savings) and wondered why her Windows ME system time was wrong..
As I suspected though, being part of “IT evil” probably will cause a lot of my point to be largely ignored here.
Nice posts Rask. It’s nice to hear something besides the “rally the troops” chants and grammar correction here.
Rask – don’t even bother – MDN and the “faithful” are so wrapped up in how great a world will be with no IT people they frequently think it actually might happen.
TCO is only part of what any decent IT shop considers and to think a whole technology department is there for the focus of fixing pc’s is amusing. Our global company with over 2,000 IT people support more then 30,000 users. Apple just cannot deal with that scale. Wonderful PC and fantastic for home use and small companies but once you have to support it in enterprise it falls on it’s face.
– No roadmap from Apple on product lines
– No heads on patches for testing etc
– No enterprise support / purchasing. Apple actually suggested we can utilize the Apple Store as a support channel. Umm right.
They think small and will always be small in this vertical due to they just don’t understand what it takes. Flame away but its the hard truth at pretty much every major company on the planet. Did I miss market share exploding from companies moving enmasse to Mac? Fear Windows 7 – it will erase any Mac gain in the past 5 years next year when companies start spending money again and upgrade older hardware.
everyone knows that the bigger the company, the taller the silos. For the IT department to justify its staffing budget, it has to appear to be productive. When supporting Windows, there is always plenty of maintenance chores, patches, and so forth to justify the army of techs.
If the IT silo gets too tall, though, the standard corporate solution is to outsource the professional regular army to a ragtag group of Hessian mercenaries, as if they will win the IT battle for you.
It would be cheaper and less painful to make peace with your employees and allow them the freedom to have tea, i mean Apples.
Note, too, that the only computing that top management ever sees is:
1) Pow-wow point
2) Outhouse / Crackberry
3) some CRM or database or Excel if they actually get their hands dirty.
In other words, the dweebs who authorize the purchase of computers wrongly assume that a Microsoft OS is a mandatory item – after all, MS makes presentation software, email, and Access, don’t they? And the MS sales rep army takes the whole IT executive wing to great parties, lunches, dinners, and golf outings, don’t they? Well, then, it’s all decided what crapware to buy.
Amusing but I find a QUITE large chunk of the IT budget taken up by SAP, SYBASE, Siebel, Cognos, EMC as you know there are terabytes of data to store and replicate. Not to mention a sizable mainframe backend still being used, AIX etc.
Did I through in a hefty PBX cost as well?
For any large enterprise Microsoft is just part of a large portfolio.