Ogg writes, “Now here’s the big question: Does your IT department, the guys who think it’s just fine that you’re still using a Windows XP laptop (and P.S., stop whining about it), give a hoot about all this Apple stuff?”
“The pitch [Apple] has been making in recent months is simple: Employees are already using plenty of Apple products on their own time and like them, and the iPad is a great, lightweight tool for Web-based corporate software,” Ogg writes. “If you thought this was just lip service, Apple is even now working with the decidedly old-school consultants at Unisys to approach big corporate and government customers.”
“‘IT managers in the past have said, ‘I don’t want unique experiences,” pointed out Richard Shim, analyst for IDC. For IT department managers, people on different systems often just translates to a huge headache,” Ogg reports. “[But] The Enterprise Desktop Alliance, a group of enterprise software companies that integrate Mac and Windows systems for businesses, said that during its recent survey of more than 460 IT administrators that more and more employees are asking their IT departments for Macs.”
Ogg reports, “The Enterprise Desktop Alliance is predicting that Macs will climb from 3.3 percent of all systems at companies last year to 5.2 percent in 2011. That’s still small, but it represents sizable growth: between 2009 and 2011 one of every four new systems added at companies will be Macs, though much of that will come from companies already deploying Apple machines, according to the IT administrators they surveyed.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Mr. IT Doofus: Lead, follow, or, finally, GTF out of the way. Luckily for world productivity, many of the most myopic IT idiots are retiring or soon will be. Here’s to the disappearance of entrenched, unreasonable IT morons dedicated to erecting walls to progress!
Q: Will the IT doofus finally see the Apple light?
A: NO, not now that Apple’s knifed the XServe baby and effectively killed OS X Server in the Enterprise
IT guys, just remember, Doofus is as Doofus does.
Our IT department is made up of many Mac users. But i think the reason for this is age. They are all younger. The Senior Network Administrator is only 27 has Macs at home. The majority of them have iPhones, only a few have incredibles; but i think that is because they have verizon. They have slowly put macs out on the network, but have to use remote desktop for applications that dont run on the Mac that we need business wise. The old IT director that is now the Ops Chief, is very anti-apple. I have been in meetings where a website may be down or something and she will blame the Mac. She got in our CEOs ear so much that they actually made IT remove the computer from the conference room. I know for a fact that she wanted to have an IT person written up because they gave a employee an iPad to try instead of a computer for checking email while on a buisness trip. but as i was saying my IT department is made up of a younger generation who is fine with using Macs. I am sure as they become more popular with employees the newer IT personal will be very willing to give the employees the computer they want to use.
Be kind to the IT doofus. His only experience of the IT world heretofore is Microsoft. Its complexities, bugs, flaws, problems, malware, and the long hours on the weekend to placate a raging executive to save his job has given him a sort of post-traumatic stress. Now you ask him to add Apple to the mix. He has a flashback! He explodes! He’s terrified! His involuntary reaction is that adding Apple is like adding another Microsoft, and if that were true, it would be an impossibly hellish nightmare job.
One way to treat flashbacks is to gradually and repeatedly expose the person to the stimulus until it doesn’t evoke a flashback anymore.
(I had post-traumatic stress. Once I was in the grocery store when a song over the PA system gave me a flashback. I left my cart and my groceries in the middle of the aisle and got out of the store. When I got home, I listened to that song over and over again until the pain was gone and it was just a song.)
So expose the IT doofus to Apple stuff gradually. Give him an iPod. Let him play with your iPad. Talk to him about UNIX. Show him the switcher videos on Apple’s web site. Set up a temporary account on your MacBook and let him play with it. Ask him to join your MacBook to the AD domain, and let him see there is no restart.
Microsoft is more than just a software company. It’s a disease, and recovery is possible.
As an IT Doofus for a large company in the financial sector, I have seen the light (for many years now) and Apple products are in use, in our marketing department for artists. The big killers here are custom written apps and excel macros and formulas that do not work on a Mac. The second “Big Killer” here is up front cost. Mac Pro towers vs Dell hardware is about a 4:1 price difference. In a financial company, these things matter.
But yes I have been places where Macs outnumbered the PC’s 10:1, and with a staff of 3-4 IT people we kept EVERYTHING running. T.C.O. on the mac is MUCH lower, but it’s a lot harder to show an accountant that.
@RP3
The need to run P6 and project are the only reason I own a few Windows computers.
Now that Koppleman has sold out, let’s see if Steve’s buddy Larry will port P6 to OS X.
@dijonaise
The company I’m consulting for at the moment has a multi-million dollar investment in XServes, used as animation render farms and XSan controllers. Following last week’s announcement they are now seriously looking at moving away from their FCS based workflow, meaning Apple will also lose all the pro app sales and possibly even sales of the MacPros the work currently gets done on.
Apple are free to ditch these products completely of course, but when they arbitrarily make decisions to cut the lifetime of product lines that their customers build their entire business model on nobody should complain that other companies’ IT functions refuse to deal with Apple at all. When your own company’s revenue depends on a large scale IT deployment you don’t want any company that can suddenly and without warning pull the rug out from the products you need involved in any way.
So if the enterprise doesn’t want Apple, Apple only have their own decisions to blame. Suddenly killing the XServe just blew years of progress they’d made with IT.
Get used to your Windows PCs at work folks.
@ Jim
“Surely if people other than Mac Heads thought Apple was SO much better than Microsoft, then Apple would make up the 97% share computers? Right??”
Very true, and by that same logic, MacDonald’s makes the very best hamburger in the world.
And stop calling me Shirley.
@ Dave H
Not to mention the higher ed market as well.
I agree with those who say Apple turned their backs on the enterprise when they announced discontinuing the XServe. Although I would never need one, it always indicated to me the Apple at least had their foot in the door. The recent Unisys announcement, gave me additional hope, now dashed by the Xserve issue. Many will remember the Apple RAID card discontinuation, but at least there was another viable card available. I also agree that in a large enterprise environment, it is difficult to integrate Macs. I am responsible for a small business environment and have introduced Mac hardware (it is simply far more elegant) but most are running W7 because of software requirements. Where that is not an issue, they boot into OSX. Like many things, there is no simple solution.
@Micro Me
I took the opposite approach to introducing my MacBook Pro into the office. (Everyone had a laptop)
I began by putting the company-issued Dell laptop under my desk where it could not be seen. I positioned the Dell monitor with its back to the door. No one could see my monitor but me.
After some time, I replaced the keyboard with Apple’s wired keyboard (works fine on a PC). People were amazed to see me use a flash drive by plugging it into the keyboard.
After a while, I added an Apple mouse.
My next gutsy step was to replace the Dell laptop under the desk with my MacBook Pro. I did all my work on the MacBook Pro, but no one could see because of the way I had positioned my monitor. I kept the Dell handy just in case I needed it. When I determined I didn’t need it, I left the Dell in my trunk. Eventually I checked it in so that I had no company-issued computer at all.
Because of my duties, I was able to add computers to the domain. I added the MacBook Pro.
Finally, I had a conversation with an executive who claimed that Macs weren’t suited to the office. I turned around my screen and told him I had been using a Mac exclusively for half a year.
No one bothered me about the Mac.
O ye of little faith. So many people were using the Mac Mini as a server that Apple started selling a server version. Now they sell a server version of the MacPro. They discontinued the Xserve. That means 1) they are not discontinuing servers, 2) they are coming out with a new product to replace the Xserve.
Apple is in the business of selling CONSUMER ELECTRONICS; IT doofuses are trying to keep a BUSINESS running.
Until Apple products are ENTERPRISE focused, why should IT doofuses be Apple focused?
Apple is doing just fine without enterprise products, and enterprise is doing just fine without Apple products.
If employees want to play with Apple toys, they are free to do that on their own time.
@ A Scheduler
I would really like to see that! Oracle needs to move towards Mac sometime.
@ Harvey
Thanks for that. I suspect there are many others like us, quietly battling their IT depts.
My fall back position, if my iMac was confiscated (there were several threats to do so), was to hide a Mac mini under my desk, attached to their PC monitor. A techie friend said he could get me a switch that would toggle the monitor between the PC and mini if anybody came in the room. Fortunately, I never had to try out that approach.
If Apple wants to play in the enterprise and has $50+ Billion available, who’s fault is it?
License OSX server to IBM to run on their server HW and make investments in SW companies to develop their apps for OSX. Otherwise- we’ll loan you x dollars at no interest to develop for our platform, and will convert the investment into common stock if you don’t pay back within a certain time frame.
@Micro Me
It might not be necessary to have a switch. The monitor I was using had two inputs, VGA and DVI. I plugged both computers into it and switched back and forth with the monitor’s controls. The manufacturer doesn’t recommend it, but it worked for over a year with no ill effect.
Make sure you are facing the door so that no one can see the screen without standing behind you.
If you don’t know this already, Ctrl+Shift+Eject turns off the screen. Any mouse movement or keystroke restores it. You can use that to hide the display when you need to do it quickly, but don’t touch the mouse.
I hope Macs become more common in enterprise, because Apple will learn a lot and I, as a consumer, will benefit.
I love my Mac for what it’s security, but it’s a pig to use.
No, no they won’t … because Apple just exited the server market.
It is apparent Apple is focusing on consumer market, not enterprise.
After this latest pronouncement, I’m worried about how long support for Mac Pro is going to last.
Incidentally, a cost comparison between Apple and Dell won’t necessarily produce meaningful results. The company likely gets a discount from Dell for volume purchases, and they also get on-site service within 24 hours (really). That makes Macs look even more expensive to the IT department, and since (for them) the repair cost of the Apple hardware is unknown, there has to be a justification for the Mac that outweighs any cost consideration.
@Harvey, IT budgets forecasts don’t run on faith. As the tech guy in a small non-profit I have to project major expenditures up to 3 or 4 years in advance, and know that the pieces I’m putting together aren’t going to disappear from under me in six months’ time.
If Apple wanted to play in the enterprise hardware business they should’ve announced a viable replacement strategy (like allowing virtualization on HP, IBM or other established “big iron” players) the same time they killed the X-Serve, but they didn’t.
MacMinis and Mac Pros might be fine for a small office, but MacPros aren’t suitable replacements for high-availability rackmount servers–no hot-swappable drives, no redundant power, and even put on its side it takes up 7 times the rack space of a single X-Serve. So a full server cabinet that could hold 42 1U X-Serves, can only hold 6 Mac Pros. For a small business renting rackspace, that’s a horrible value.
Having worked on a Mac in a previous job, lost that due to layoffs, took another job and was forced to use a Dell.
It’s like being sentenced to Hell for a crime you didn’t commit. IT staff says NO MACS.
Nice to go home to my iMac for relief from computing Hell. An oasis of sanity and productivity.
Wonder how many people sneak tasks home to do on their Mac because it’s faster/easier than trying to do them at work on a Dumb Dell? Hmm… maybe that’s management’s secret weapon to get people to put in additional unpaid work hours at home.
MDN magic word: “red” as in seeing red over all this.
This is why business always buys the cheapest. No exception – you know like the cheapest switches and routers from cisco, the cheapest servers from hp and dell, not forgetting the absolute bottom rate printers and copiers for their worthless office staff.
Cheap desks and cheap office chairs all housed in a very cheap office somewhere.
But when it comes to personal computers, it’s a very different matter entirely. Only good quality, high end will do. We’re talking hp and dell here folks, top quality and worth every penny.
Wintard logic would have you believe that accountants can’t figure out savings Made through long term cost benefits. Do they really think everyone else here is as stupid as them?
What do you expect from people whose job relies on computers being a headache for user?
@ Harvey
There was nothing as sophisticated as a DVI input on this monitor. One VGA port only, so a switch it would have been. And there was no option but for my desk and iMac to face away from the door, which fortunately was always closed.
Incidentally, my Mac use only became an issue when other staff started lobbying to get one like mine, in spite of my pleas for them to remain silent.
I found it ironic that none of the IT staff I was battling with was born when I first started using a desktop computer (1983; an Altos running 8 bit CPM). But these kids were quite happy to try and tell me what computer I needed to get my job done.
When I explained that the PC made me less productive, one of them actually said, “We don’t care. We just want you to use what everybody else does”. I suspect that pretty much sums up a lot of IT thinking.