@ Jeremy,
My apologies! I’ve been reading too many blogs today:-) Your initial post was spot on.

What’s a couple of hundred bucks more per seat (every few years) for hardware, compared to laying off half your IT department?

That is somewhat of a trojan horse into enterprise in same way that VMware leveraged multi-OS application testing at workgroup level to back door into enterprise datacenters.

Also, bear in mind, there a number of segments like media, entertainment and agency that the creative types have been on Mac for awhile and now the business types are looking longingly at getting on that bandwagon.

Tendency is to see this stuff in all or none terms when truth is that segments and workgroups are where real beachheads lie.

Cheers,

Mark
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My Blog: http://www.thenetworkgarden.com

1. Hardware can go bad no matter what fancy case you put around it. All hardware is going to have issues. The main reasons for a Mac is faster more stable OS and design of the machine.

2. The longevity of a Mac will outweigh the high initial cost.

3. Supporting costs for Mac is lower. You even stated that you support 60 by yourself. Apple says 1 tech per 100 machines. Right now I’m 250 Macs by myself and 90 of those are used by kids. There are plenty of education institutions that are supporting well over the 1 to 100 ratio.

4. Macs become more popular they will end up in big business.

I don’t want to start an argument in replies but I don’t understand how I berated anything, especially Macs.

Those numbers seem high. I run an all-Mac shop of 60 laptops/workstations. I can easily support them plus every other IT function. Apple states internally they have one IT support person for every 100 employees. And that counts server and network admins. Of course, every new Apple employee has to set up their own Mac when they arrive. I guess they figure you shouldn’t be working there if you can’t configure it yourself.

Anyway, I think Apple will make a dent in the Enterprise. But consider the various OS revisions that come loaded on new Macs. If a company standardizes on, say, 10.5.2, and six months down the road they purchases more Macs, they will probably be running 10.5.3 and will not be able to run the older version. Most large corporations can’t change that fast. But, it really only matters if the software running on them doesn’t work. So, who knows.

@Jeremy
Have you ever worked for a Fortune 100 company? I have. We used Macs as well as PCs. This isn’t a Mac vs. PC argument. It’s the fact that very little has to change internally to allow Macs on a network. Windows file servers support Macs quite nicely, as well as do Exchange and Domino servers. And Apple Xserves also support Windows PCs without having to pay for per-seat licenses. That is a huge cost savings when all you want to do is serve files or printing. Be specific instead of berating something you know nothing about.

Anyway, I work with a research scientist who used to work for Raytheon. They did a survey and found that it took three technicians to service 100 Macs, whereas it took 10 to service the same number of PCs. Once that kind of information gets out, that will make people think.

And if Apple was smart, they’d start doing some “Get a Mac ads” with the two guys talking about enterprise. (And come up with a real enterprise program.) But that will have to wait until they get a bit bigger. Then they can spend some of that $20 billion in cash they have stored up to build up an Enterprise infrastructure that will work and make money for them. The iPhone is the first step in that direction.

Hardware is hardware, it doesn’t matter what manufacture puts it into a case, it can have issues.

I think what big businesses have to look at is long term cost. The cost of owning a Mac long term is cheaper. It’s the up front cost that’s expensive. I don’t know if you have tried to use a Windows computer after 5 years. It sucks and you would rather just not use the internet. We have 7 year old white iBooks that we still check out to students on a daily basis. They still work and allow them to type papers just fine. Our life span on Windows laptops is about 4 years before we stop using them because of all the complaints.

Another thing they need to look at is support costs. I am working daily to clean spyware and just crap off slow Windows computers. What they pay me to do that could be applied to a Mac that I won’t have to worry about them getting spyware and virus’.

I think as the popularity of Macs grow for home users, businesses will start adopting them, even big businesses. Right now if businesses switch to Mac they would also have training costs. Wait a few more years let Apple get a bigger market share and then you will see iMacs sitting in cubicles.