In a recent article at InformIT, author Ryan Faas took the time to
go about debunking
his top ten myths about Macs and why they're not suitable for
the enterprise,
by which he means large-scale business. I commend him for his work and
generally agree - Macs are as ready as any other Unix workstation for
the enterprise, be it in the server room, the engineer's workstation,
or the secretary's desk.
Unfortunately, debunking these myths won't do a thing to help Macs
become more integrated into the business world. No, those who come to
understand the benefits of using Macs, regardless of what portion of
the operation they would join, tend not to be the ones that you need to
convince - and the ones who need to be convinced have different reasons
for not choosing Macs.
The Myths
With regards to the availability of software, it's true that it is
getting broader. You can find implementations of everything from office
suites to CRM packages to development environments. But the problem has
never been one of a lack of appropriate software so much as a lack of
the exact software package that the business has decided to standardize
upon. If it were simple enough to just have an option, some
user-friendly distribution of Linux would have eaten Windows' lunch
long ago.
But OpenOffice and Eclipse and MySQL, no matter how good they are as
office suite, programming environment, and SQL database, do not serve
as one-to-one replacements for Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, and
Microsoft SQL Server - at least not in the eyes of the folks who make
the decisions and write the checks.
No, an array of fantastic software packages is not enough against an
entrenched enemy whose sales force has convinced a large number of
people that there is no replacement for their specific products.
Faas goes on to suggest that it's not just "creative types" who want
Macs, a fact that I think we can all get behind. It's obvious from
the sales figures
that this simply can't be the case anymore, if it ever was.
Where he goes awry here is in his reference to the Mac@IBM project,
wherein IBM employees were given the option to have Mac workstations
instead of PCs. I can tell you from my experience at IBM that I, too,
would have wanted a Mac, but it wasn't an option then, so we did the
next best thing - we installed Linux on every computer we could lay our
hands on.
...it's not so much a testament to how nice Macs
are so much as it is a testament to how poorly Windows is
received.
While I think this is a myth worth squashing, it's not so much a
testament to how nice Macs are so much as it is a testament to how
poorly Windows is received. And those technical professionals would
likely take a hand-me-down Pentium III over a quad-core powerhouse if
they were given the option of running something with a Unix backend on
it.
The integration question gets easier to deal with all the time, and
Faas notes that in his third myth. That said, it's still easier to
integrate a Windows machine with a Windows network simply by virtue of
the software. It's not that hard to integrate a Mac, but it is
marginally harder.
And that's where this myth takes some real trouble to bust. Because
the people who have to accept the reality of Macs being part of the
Windows network are the same MCSEs and MCPs who don't want to have to
learn something new when they spent time and money learning all the
nonsense required to make Windows behave. It'll be harder to get them
on the side of the Mac fans than you might think.
Myth number four, about the ease of deployment and support ties into
the same problems as myth numbers one and three. Yes, there are very
nice programs for monitoring systems and re-imaging a misbehaving
workstation, but they're not the programs that the guys in the white
short sleeve shirts are used to. It's not Norton Ghost and IBM Tivoli,
so they probably don't want to hear about it.
This myth may disappear for all eternity, and you'd still gain no
traction against the inertia of existing infrastructure.
With the fifth myth, we find one that really does need to be
addressed. Apple does and has offered enterprise-class support
packages. I think this is one of those times where Apple gets tagged
with the same brush as some of the smaller, less well organized Linux
distributions of five or six years ago: Red Hat could be counted on for
your business, but only a fool would put Slackware on a production box!
(In the spirit of full disclosure, I was one of those fools who put it
on production boxes and lived to tell the tale.)
Apple's support tends to be rock solid, and I can't imagine that it
would get worse at the enterprise help desk. On the contrary, I would
think.
OS X Is Not Invulnerable
Being fair, Faas included a positive myth that needs to be debunked:
the myth of OS X invulnerability. It's a myth we, as a community, need
to all get over together. Yes, OS X is inherently more secure -
it's Unix underneath and not an aging MS-DOS - but it's far from
perfect. Apple's been taking some serious hits on this one lately, from
DNS cache poisoning to problems with iCal and the recent unpleasantness
about automatically running downloads in Safari (though, to be fair,
that was more a problem of the clash of cultures between Windows and
OS X). The sooner we accept that we can be vulnerable and have to
be as vigilant and quick to respond as the Linux people, the
better.
The difficult transition myth is really not so much a myth. Yes,
smaller organizations can make the switch with relative ease, but the
difficulty grows exponentially as the number of employees,
workstations, servers, and software packages increases. This can be
lessened to some degree with training, or even with a phased transition
by way of virtualization, but the productivity dip associated with any
major technology upheaval should not be minimized. Instead it should be
countered with projected productivity gains to be had from the final
product.
With myth number eight, we're right back into the "equal, but
different" category from the software myth, this time as it applies to
management solutions. There are great tools to manage OS X
desktops in much the same way as Group policies, but they aren't group
policies, and unless you're going to switch every machine and account
in your company all at once, that means duplication of effort.
His next paragraph takes a dive off the very deep end, suggesting
that you can avoid using an OS X server by hacking together some
changes to Active Directory or by implementing an LDAP
server - and at that point you might as well be trying to convince the
suits to go Linux instead. No, that's no solution, not in a large scale
operation anyway.
The myth of Apple being a consumer business rather than a corporate
technology partner actually has enough truth to it to make it remain an
issue. Apple does play it's cards close to it's chest, and many
businesses would want to be in the know about what was coming along in
the pipeline. That doesn't diminish the power and utility of things
like the Xserve (of which I have
written paeans in the past) and the general robustness of OS X
Server, but it does keep some larger partners from taking the plunge in
a large way - thus the prevalence of companies with small, closely
contained Mac preserves in rarefied areas.
Cost Not Really the Issue
The last myth is the one that tends to get the boss - or at least
the bookkeeper's - knickers in a twist, and that's the issue of cost.
Why, they wonder, would you buy a MacBook Pro for over US$2,000, when
you can buy a commodity Dell laptop for under $500.
I won't go into detail here, as others have so many times before,
but the cost of Mac hardware is really not that
different from PC hardware anymore, and what you lose in immediate
savings you more than make up for in power, performance, and
longevity.
And yet the chance of convincing people who have needed to purchase
new computers every couple of years that you aren't trying to pull a
fast one them is slim at best. They would rather not hear what you have
to say, and even presented with the total cost of ownership and
long-term return on investment - their native tongue! - they will still
balk at the initial outlay of capital.
Don't get me wrong - I do agree, for the most part, with what Ryan
has to say. These myths are, almost entirely, truly myths, or even
outright lies by those who have a vested interest in keeping Macs out
of their environments.
The simple fact that we bust these myths is far from enough. There
is more than just a little grain of truth to the maxim "It's hard to
convince a man that something is true when his paycheck depends on it
not being true." And until we do, Macs will always have an uphill climb
to equality, myths or no myths.
