As further evidence of the growing interest in Macs among enterprise customers, IBM's Research Information Services launched an internal pilot program designed to study the possibility of moving significant numbers of employees to the Mac platform. The study has already found an enthusiastic response from participants and is helping to drive Mac support for IBM's business applications.
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Member since:1997-10-01
Almost all of those downsides you mention also apply to Windows. You can buy your hardware from multiple vendors, but as long as Apple has to keep its prices close to other top-tier vendors, that's not that big of a deal for a company that buys all its stuff from one company already.
Member since:2005-11-07
Member since:2005-06-29
Because maybe support is cheaper? Not saying one way or another, just that if it is a significant cost saving there, that could be reason to switch.
Hypothetically
IT staff of 5 maintaining 100 windows comps = $400,000
if they could do 2 IT staff for 100 macs = $160,000
seems reason enough to me, assuming everything else worked just as well
Member since:2006-02-05
Actually, you would probably need to hire unix guys, which are typically expensive. And they would probably have some trouble, as noone really has experience with large scale mac deployments. Not only that, but it is easier to have one team with the skillset to manage 200 machines then two teams managing 100 each.
I think it has alot more to do with what he says in the intro, that they are seeing alot of people coming in who are more comfortable on macs and are asking for them.
Member since:2006-02-05
99% of people don't care about propriatary platforms or vendor lock-in.
You only care about the propriatary nature of an app if you are writing software that needs to interact with it, to end users, its the interoperability that matters. You only care about vendor lock-in if you need to swap out one of the bits on your stack semi-regularily. If that isn't a requirement, all end users care about is integration of applications within the stack they use. Not only that, but speaking as someone who worked in the J2EE/Orion/Linux/Oracle world for 5 years, even when a stack is supposedly built on "open standards", in reality, any non trivial application is still going to get locked in, as you will need to use more advanced features of your various products that are not rarely covered by standards made for compatiblity.
It depends on your requirements, and your skillset. In this case, what drove the project was user skillset being on another platform, and the requirements of said users being able to be filled on osx (the lack of visio and netmeeting turned out to not be deal breakers.)
Member since:2005-07-24
A heterogeneous closed source landscape is still better than a monopoly-dominated one. Competition is good regardless of the development model and licensing. Furthermore, open source tends to have different strengths and weaknesses than closed source. Thus it, too, benefits from having healthy closed source competition.
Member since:2005-08-31
For everything you'll use, it will have some sort of lock-in. If it's not corporate lock-in, it will be license lock-in, group dependence lock-in et cetera.
If you look it solely and uniquely as a free-software advocate and a Linux(or what ever the OS you think everyone should you because you use it) enforcer, it's true you'll find no other advantage than the one you praise.
Using windows or OS X in corporation is two different beast.
- Free compiler
- Free tools for developer
- Rich choice of scripting language out of the box (open source, standard)
- More productive interface
- Better care for details and design (design is not only aesthetics)
- Better support of standard
- Better design hardware*
* just look at the trackpad, why just Apple offers a big, multi-touch trackpad that doesn't -require- a second mouse?
Anyway, there's many room for different player in the industry. I hope open source will be in it, but also Apple, Sun, IBM.
Apple have some drawback for corporate use, but still there's more and more people who wants their products in corporation. Did IBM sensed it and wants to offer solutions. (business opportunity)
Member since:2005-07-06
Macs just work, that's the advantage. This is of course a result of having hardware and OS from the same vendor.
And "just works" is very important if you have a lot highly paid employees trying to get as much consultant fees as possible from your clients.
In other words, IBM can't afford anything but the best.
Member since:2005-07-06
I still fail to see how buying a Mac locks you into Apple. It is my understanding you can run pretty much any x86 OS out there. It is also possible to install and run many of the thousands of UNIX programs out there. Not to mention it has been my experience that the equivalent software between Windows and Macs is usually cheaper on the Mac side.
The only real downside of buying a Mac seems to be cost. And I would bet IBM can get them cheaper than you or I can. :-)
Member since:
2005-09-21
I don't mean to be a troll, but why would they do something like that? What business advantage does Mac have over Windows? It's still a proprietary platform, you're tied to one vendor, you have to pay license fees, and the hardware choices are more limited.
If you're happy with a proprietary OS and vendor lockin, then just stay with Windows. If you really want to get out of that, then go for a free platform. User interface aside, it's not like you're dealing with a better company by going to Apple.