MacDailyNews Take: “Shocking” to whom, or was Morgenstern simply being sarcastic?
Morgenstern continues, “The Enterprise Desktop Alliance survey took results from organizations that had 50 or more servers or over 100 Macs, what the organization said were enterprises, academic sites and government agencies.”
The respondents were given the option to select from a range of cost differences. Not only did the administrators across the board say that Macs were less expensive, in all but one category the majority of administrators who said Macs cost less said they were more than 20 percent less expensive to manage than PCs. Of those who asserted that PCs cost less, the majority always asserted that PCs were between 0 and 20 percent less expensive to manage than Macs.
Morgenstern reports, “The figures that pop out are those for the time spent troubleshooting problems (16 vs 65 percent, [Macs and PCs, respectively]), dealing with help desk calls (16 vs 54 percent), training users (16 vs 48 percent) and managing system configs. (25 vs 50 percent).”
“Another recent EDA survey found that 66 percent of IT administrators in large organizations that currently have both Macs and PCs will increase the number of Macs in their sites. The reasons? In addition to the ease of support (and the associated cost reductions found in the survey above), user preference, and increased productivity,” Morgenstern reports. “Whatever the combination of reasons or just the fact that the Mac is better, users seem to have shaken off the past FUD from Redmond and Intel that fell on the Apple platform.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Edward W.” for the heads up.]
Oh- I’m so “shocked” by this ‘news’.
We have approx. 400 workstations in our organization with about 40 – 50 Macs; take a guess which 10% we don’t worry about when there’s a new virus or malware alert. On more than one occasion- we had to literally walk around and shutdown all the PeeCees just to find the one’s clogging the network with out of control malware activity. We left the Macs on.
I asked our head computer tech why he insists that our company only buy PCs. “Because they BREAK!” he answered. “I fix computers and I want to keep my job!”
NO SH-T!
Those IT guys are soooo clever.
Used to work on 2000+ network with 150 macs… was the lone Mac support guy. All the PC support guy could never figure out why I hardly left my office.
Even had a Maytag commercial style photo of myself, with feet on my desk, posted in my office.
Eventually I told them my secret. Whenever I got a call or email from someone having a problem, I pretended to be as busy as the PC guys and by the time I made it to the user, he had already figured out the problem.
Old “news”.
This has been the case for YEARS, even back in the 90’s and Mac Systems 7, 8 & 9.
Moving on…
Uh, No Shit Sherlock!!
I think part of this is because people who are using these macs in the workplace do so mostly by choice, and so they likely are more computer literate. That translates to a lower help-desk call ratio. People who don’t know what they’re doing are more likely to be on a PC, thus they’ll be calling the PC support team.
My grandmother is a smart lady, but wasn’t computer literate when we got her a mac. It took a LOT of support to get her used to it. That said, I think it would have been worse with a PC.
To compare apples to apples, a study needs to find a location where Mac usage is the norm (meaning computer illiterates have to use them), and then compare *those* IT support numbers to other institutions. When they turn out to be better, then it will really mean something.
This is the kind of reporting that is scaring the hell out of IT/CIO Windows drones. I can see meeting right now with these groups coming up with counterpoints and scare tactics to management when asked about this report.
Shocking**
to all those PC-only IT folks who are in danger to lose their jobs.
The refreshing thing here is that more people are now seeing that Macs have a drastically lower TOC than PCs.
@sn
Your conclusion that given an illiterate computer user, getting them competently to use a PC is far more difficult and support intensive than a Mac is backed up by my experience:
Case study #1: Single mother, 38 yrs, immigrant from SE Asia, never had her own computer (had always used her father’s to browse the Internet), I gave her an old XP box (sitting in my garage), computer illiterate (worked in a hair salon), so not even word processing experience. After the first week, she became frustrated with it, worse yet, she had opened a spam email and the next day, the computer slowed down to molasses. I got it back to fix, ended up reinstalling the OS (ugh!). Lasted 2 more weeks during which she was always calling to ask [support] questions. I suggested she bite the bullet and buy a Mac. Finally got her an older Mac Mini with OSX for $350, showed her how to use it and in over 6 months, haven’t had a single call.
Case Study #2: Minister, 49 yrs, gave him the XP from above (figured being a 49 y.o. guy he’d be OK), within days, he was calling me for tech support (sorry, but they were really dumb questions), completely computer illiterate (little did I know). After becoming frustrated myself (how could I just “cut off” support to a Minister friend?), so pulled a dual 1.8 Ghz G5 out of retirement (from my garage), running OSX and taught him the basics, over the first week, answered some support calls and since then, no more calls (about 3 months).
Having spoken to both, asking how they’re doing with their Mac’s, they say they’re fine, “no problems”. My conclusions are: compared to the XP box, they don’t get the malware or viruses which would otherwise make their user experience frustrating and I believe because it’s was easier to teach (for me) and understand (for them) the basics of “using” OSX vs XP.
My Mom is an “older lady” … at least a day older than said minister.
She tried the library’s PC several times, didn’t like it. I bought her an early iBook, it was much better. Screen too small. SHE bought a larger iBook (white) and has been mostly fine since. My niece helped her update her software recently and that led to several problems. Like, her browser (switched to Firefox) opened a tiny, TINY window. Ah, Mum? Click on the green dot at the top. THANKS!
Most of my tech support calls have been that easy. Most frequent problem? She drags an icon off the Dock while clicking to start the program.
Think these would be serious problems for most office drones?
Years ago, I gave my my father (now in his eighties) my old Mac Plus, which he pottered away happily on, learning the basics of computer use. Then my cousin visited him, and assured him that a newer PC (running Windows 98, as I recall) was a far better option (“It has a colour screen”), and gave it to him.
It was a disaster. Although he wasn’t on the internet at that time, the machine was soon crashing, spewing out arcane error messages, and frustrating the hell out of him. I left it long enough for him to get the message, and then replaced it with an eMac. This lasted him for years.
He now surfs happily on his new iMac, and takes delight in listening to the stories of his nephews, including my misguided cousin, about their PC woes, virus infections, etc. When he gets stuck on his Mac, I can fix it by remote control using iChat. Macs rule for older folks.
I have many more examples from my workplace, but that’s a longer story.
Note that this study shows only the cost of purchase and support.
If your worker is down for one hour per week do to problems, then that can cost you anywhere from $1000 to $5000.
I was tech writing for a company on contract several years ago (Win-NT days) and I spent a *minimum* of five hours per week with problems anywhere from rebooting due to MS Word crashing the system, to serious configuration problems that required a tech person to fix.
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Didn’t bother me – I was on contract.
They were spending $200 per week for over a year in lost productivity. You can buy a lot of computers with that money.
While easier to maintain, Macs are not easier to rollout, have multiple users or share resources in an Active Directory environment.
You can’t spell SHIT without IT.
Just say’in.
At the university I teach, there is no windows machine anymore – students who bring their own machine get no support for windows, but they can buy a MacBook really cheap. And now all the room reservations can be done by iPhone…
“Macs have a better TCO (total cost of ownership) than Windows boxes, and require less user training and help,”
That was proven over 15 years ago. Is that how long it takes for reality to sink into the heads of Windows IT support personnel?
Actually, I believe Apples at-long-last quality compatibility between MOSX Server 10.6 and Windows Server has turned the tide. Took long enough! But it’s here.