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IBM Businesses Apple

IBM's Pilot Program For Internal Use of Macs 257

Posted by kdawson from the thinking-different-than-blue dept.
geoffrobinson writes "Roughly Drafted has obtained internal IBM documents detailing the results of a small pilot program for internal use of Macs. Positive and negative results were detailed, but overall most participants were happy with their Mac experience. The pilot will be expanded this year. One advantage cited: less reliance on Windows. So it seems a mix of Macs, PCs, and Linux boxes are in IBM's future. Given the history between IBM and Microsoft, this is quite interesting."
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IBM's Pilot Program For Internal Use of Macs More

IBM's Pilot Program For Internal Use of Macs

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  • Why wouldn't an engineer want a Mac? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 18, 2008 @12:15PM (#23119652)
    Functional on the inside (Unix), functional on the outside (Mac OS).

  • This shouldn't be a surprise! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Realistic_Dragon ( 655151 ) on Friday April 18, 2008 @12:16PM (#23119668) Homepage
    Can you imagine the shocked faces seen around the world if it was announced that StuffHauler Inc, a long time Ford customer, was trying out GM brand vehicles? Me too, people would find it hard to believe!

    Right.

    In every other market it's normal to run trials to evaluate several options when making critical capital investment choices. It is only an inexplicable level of incompetence that means that most large companies don't do regular small scale tests of alternative solutions, just to keep tabs on them. Even if all you get out of it is some knowledge and possible a price break from a worried Microsoft it is still worth the time and money.

    Software investment in a 100k user company will be upwards of $10m yet the contracts are let without even a thought of competitive tender or technical justification. If I let that through for any vendor on my normal projects I would be shit canned so fast my seat would still be warm when my replacement arrived.

    • Re:This shouldn't be a surprise! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by truthsearch ( 249536 ) on Friday April 18, 2008 @12:21PM (#23119754) Homepage Journal
      But unlike most large companies, IBM isn't only a software customer. They're a vendor and consulting firm. This isn't news just because they're trying it in-house. The implications down the road are more IBM apps working natively on Macs and significant influence in migrating other companies to Mac desktops.
      • Sorry, that should be desktops and laptops. Which is also interesting since they only left the laptop business 3 years ago.

      • Re:This shouldn't be a surprise! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 18, 2008 @12:31PM (#23119948)
        Posting as an AC because I have direct experience with IBM Global Services (their consulting/services/outsourcing division).

        What IBM decides to use internally has NO bearing on what they try to get customers to use. They will still push IBM boxes with either Linux or Windows. This is just a pilot for internal use.

        • Re:This shouldn't be a surprise! (Score:5, Insightful)

          by barzok ( 26681 ) on Friday April 18, 2008 @01:15PM (#23120558)
          True, but if IBM's consultants start showing up at client offices with MacBook Pros instead of Thinkpads, the clients will notice, and start thinking "hey, if it works for IBM, maybe we should look at using Macs too"

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward
            What exactly does IBM have to do with Thinkpads now [lenovo.com]?
        • News Flash. IBM doesn't sell PCs anymore.

          They sold the Business to Lenovo. THAT company still sells computers under the IBM brand name.

          But the computers are not IBM computers and therefore the company can be fairly agnostic about whether to support one platform or another.
    • Absolutely. I would opine that anyone that wants to position their services in opposition to MS would have to cater to all competitive products.

      MS has left some holes in the application portfolio of the Mac user. Sure there are alternatives, but there are also holes to exploit there.

      If you can happily get your products to work on any OS, and happily network with any OS, you will find a sweet spot. (Note: this prognostication is FOC)

      I believe that as reported in some trade press articles, Windows is running

    • Re:This shouldn't be a surprise! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Ritchie70 ( 860516 ) on Friday April 18, 2008 @12:52PM (#23120258) Journal
      Perhaps a better analogy would be a real one in the rental car business.

      Until recently, Ford owned Hertz, and Hertz's fleet was entirely Ford Motor Company vehicles. Ford spun them off in 2005. Now Hertz is buying cars from GM, Hyundai and Toyota as well as Ford.

      That probably started as a pilot program. It probably made the "Auto Rental Weekly News" or whatever as interesting. Everyone else yawned when it went out on the PR news wire from GM, Hyundai and Toyota.

      In this case, IBM (a company that used to make laptops and desktops) sold off their laptop and desktop business. A couple years later, they started a pilot program to try laptops from another manufacturer than the one who bought their business unit. It made the news on Slashdot, and everyone else is going to yawn when Apple sends out the blurb on the PR news wire.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by wass ( 72082 )
      100% Wrong. IBM used to make the Thinkpad.

      So your analogy should be more like asking a group of long-time Ford assembly-line workers to try out a new Mazda for their own personal use. And finding that 86% of them prefer the new company's product over that which their own company made.
      • Unfortunately, you fail at making a car analogy.

        Ford owns 33% of Mazda, and many Mazdas (the Mazda6, Mazda Tribute, and the B-series truck, among others) are built on Ford assembly lines, by Ford workers. And, EVERY current-production Mazda except for possibly the RX-8 has at least one Ford part in it.

        No... this is different.

        This would be like... Volvo (the truck company) using Saabs to shuttle executives around. A former competitor, but Volvo (the truck company) got out of the car business (selling their car manufacturing division to Ford.) But, still blasphemy.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by maddskillz ( 207500 )
      Actually, I think if this was a News for People who Like Trucks website, that would probably be big news.

    • Re:This shouldn't be a surprise! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Friday April 18, 2008 @01:56PM (#23121074)

      What is so surprising? From my understanding, IBM Research is involved in the pilot program. And they are specifically studying issues involving Macs. IBM Research might be using Suns and Dell Linux boxes too for all we know. This is not IBM Sales using the Macs. That might bring shock. Even MS uses Macs in development and research.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
      "Can you imagine the shocked faces seen around the world if it was announced that StuffHauler Inc, a long time Ford customer, was trying out GM brand vehicles? Me too, people would find it hard to believe!"

      More likely if Buck was trying out Ford brand vehicles. In case you missed it IBM created the PC standard that Microsoft rode to world domination.
      Throw in that IBM is a HUGE company and that they have a very large influence on the tech industry and I think you are way off base in your downplaying this.

      Th

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by geekoid ( 135745 )
      Around the world? no, but withing some parts of the industry? yes.

      Slashdot is not the world.
  • Given IBM's various and sundry Linux initiatives, I am more curious by the Mac versus Linux desktop implications here than Mac versus Windows. It seems obvious that IBM would shift off Windows as fast as they could regardless.

    • Mac versus Linux desktop
      no wget, you gotta use curl instead

      • no wget, you gotta use curl instead
        If you feel strongly enough about wget vs. curl, certainly you would just compile wget, no?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by JoeCommodore ( 567479 )
      Macs have a lot more commercial offerings than Linux.

      Linux has a lot more up-to-date/less bug-ridden FOSS offerings than Macs.

      Both have SSH and other unixy goodness that make them working together pretty nice. Then again OSX does not follow all the rules Linux does.

      Both are easier to manage than Windows (system wise and license wise)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by abigor ( 540274 )

        Linux has a lot more up-to-date/less bug-ridden FOSS offerings than Macs.

        Then again OSX does not follow all the rules Linux does.
        Could you be more specific on both of these? Thanks.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by JoeCommodore ( 567479 )
          Linux more up to date FOSS:

          Many FOSS projects I am interested in (Open Office, Scribus being two big ones) are really lagging behind in the OSX ports, either more bugs or are a version behind. I understand that is partly because of Aqua or some other binding issue with OSX. It is truly not the seamless experience you get with running a Linux version on Linux.

          Macs don't always follow the Linux rules:

          I've had to do some on my SAMBA server to get Macs to properly use permissions. Usually when I find a probl

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by abigor ( 540274 )

            Linux more up to date FOSS:

            Many FOSS projects I am interested in (Open Office, Scribus being two big ones) are really lagging behind in the OSX ports, either more bugs or are a version behind. I understand that is partly because of Aqua or some other binding issue with OSX. It is truly not the seamless experience you get with running a Linux version on Linux.

            I see what you mean now. Well, the X Window versions will be up to date, so you could always run those.

            Macs don't always follow the Linux rules:

            I've had to do some on my SAMBA server to get Macs to properly use permissions. Usually when I find a problem, I do a bunch of googleing and end up with some obscure note that SMB was mis-configured in OS X and to get it to work with Linux add: xxx into your servers conf file, etc. (I plug in the lines and usually it works, but many times it doesn't 'just work')

            Other times it's a case of "Oh yeah, Apple fixed that - but only in the [insert latest version of OS] just buy upgrades" - that seems to happen a lot in Apple's support of Java Libraries.

            Okay, so misconfigured third-party stuff - I thought you were referring to OS-level stuff, like OS X does chmod differently or something bizarre like that.

            I've never had any Java problems, and all my contracts recently have been Java-related, all developed on OS X, but it's entirely possible I'm just lucky or something. Historically, Linux has had far worse Java support because of free/non-free issues, l

          • Many FOSS projects I am interested in (Open Office, Scribus being two big ones) are really lagging behind in the OSX ports, either more bugs or are a version behind. I understand that is partly because of Aqua or some other binding issue with OSX. It is truly not the seamless experience you get with running a Linux version on Linux.

            Well, IBM probably have the resources to fix that fairly quickly for the products they need. For starters, they have their own OpenOffice-based productivity suite [lotus.com] - not currently available for OS X, but that could change if IBM became Mac fans. Eclipse seems to be pretty stable on OS X these days - and who knows how much of IBMs internal stuff is built on the Eclipse application framework?

            Macs don't always follow the Linux rules:

            ...but now that OS X is officially UNIX it ought to follow POSIX rules. Anyway, OS X contains a lot of FOSS subsyste

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by falconwolf ( 725481 )

            Many FOSS projects I am interested in (Open Office, Scribus being two big ones) are really lagging behind in the OSX ports,

            However those projects that run in X on Linux also run in X on OS X. For RPM packages, there's RPM for Darwin (Mac OS X) [sourceforge.net] and Macports [macports.org]. Debian packages dpkg and apt-get can be installed with Fink [finkproject.org]. So any, well some as I don't know if they all will, Linux packages that use either of these can be installed in OS X as well.

            Falcon

    • Re:Mac vs Windows or really Mac versus Linux (Score:4, Interesting)

      by man_of_mr_e ( 217855 ) on Friday April 18, 2008 @01:14PM (#23120554)
      Indeed. It seems almost like this is tacit admission that their 5 year old plan to migrate from Windows to Linux has failed. They seem to think that MacOS is a more viable alternative to move to than Linux.

      At least that's what I take away from it. I mean, they made a big deal out of their plans to move everyone to Linux a few years ago, and to date it still hasn't happened in any large numbers.

  • For Internal Application Only (Score:5, Funny)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Friday April 18, 2008 @12:22PM (#23119766) Homepage Journal
    I know Apple makes little "nano" iPods, but is it shipping actual Macintoshes small enough to be "used internally"? Byte-sized, even?

    (*rimshot* - I'm here all weekend, folks - try the veal)
  • That's old news. I'd say given IBM and Apple's recent history, this is interesting.

  • A few things to note (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gelfling ( 6534 ) on Friday April 18, 2008 @12:24PM (#23119810) Homepage Journal
    IBM Research Watson is an entity unto itself. It has its own IT support infrastructure and runs according to its own rules. They rarely if ever want for funding.

    IBM has been non-supporting Apple for years by allowing clients to run VMWare and similar tools to host the IBM apps that don't run natively.

    IBM has been attempting to roll out an 'open' client on Linux for years. It's progressed very slowly, considering. It appears to lack funding and focus.

    IBM is aware of the MS software licencing costs which is why there is some effort to rollout an OO based Lotus alternative to MS Office.

    It doesn't serve anyone to replace MS licencing costs with Apple hardware costs. So the probability that IBM would roll out lots of expensive Apples is nil. More likely they will offer a client CD you can use to build your IBM standard client on Mac.

    The most common client rolled out today is a Thinkpad T60 or T61.

    • Upgrade cycle (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mveloso ( 325617 ) on Friday April 18, 2008 @12:40PM (#23120070)
      Note, though, that ignoring the hardware cost of a Windows box only is valid until the next hardware upgrade cycle.

      I think IBM's hardware replacement cycle is 3 years (leases), so if the timing is right there may not be that much extra expense. They'll have to upgrade the hardware to run Vista anyway, and the extra hardware cost of a Mac would be marginal at the scale that IBM is talking about. In fact, since it's all eaten by IBM finance the actual cost really doesn't matter that much (blue dollars).

      The question is if they got a productivity boost. It's unbelievably difficult to get those, so if they can show that they got a 4% or 6% boost in productivity by switching, that's more than worth the cost of the hardware/software. Scale that across IGS, and suddenly you've changed how well your whole company works.

      • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

        by Colonel Korn ( 1258968 )
        The cost difference between Mac and Windows PC hardware should be fairly small for IBM. While I, personal user, can equal a $2000 Mac with $500 of hardware and then load Ubuntu and/or Windows onto it, IBM buys in bulk from other vendors. I've been involved in about a half dozen bulk purchases of computers in the last seven years, and I'm always shocked that the cost per machine is always at least twice what it would cost to buy the components separately and put them together myself. Also, in the case of

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by itsdapead ( 734413 )

      It doesn't serve anyone to replace MS licencing costs with Apple hardware costs

      What "Apple hardware costs"? 1990 called - they want their argument back. Macs have been reasonably competitive with comparable PC hardware for a while now. There is a problem if Apple don't make anything at the price point/form factor you want (e.g. you want a low end mini-tower or a basic cheap-chunky-and-cheerful laptop) but if you read TFA they're talking about MacBook Pros (high-end premium brand laptops) as an alternative to ThinkPads (high-end premium brand laptops) so I'm sure Apple will be able

  • IBM 'might dump Windows for Mac'

    In-depth research polls, err, 24 employees

    http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/04/17/ibm-might-dump-windows-mac/ [theinquirer.net]

    • Actually, that was not accurate, according to IBM. IBM announced today there are no plans to switch entirely to Apple computers, and that this is for software development/testing purposes only.

  • The article says IBM is running a very small program to let some employees run OS X. Is that news?

    IBM is a giant corporation that has been slowly moving more and more away from Windows internally and has a large scale move to Linux underway. It is an engineering organization, in the computing field. OS X has been rapidly gaining market share in the US and undoubtedly many of IBMs customers use it to some degree.

    It would be news if IBM was not running a small program to see how well OS X works internally,

    • There are two things that make it newsworthy (well, newsworthy to the average tech geek).

      Firstly, IBM used to make the Thinkpad, and the pro-Thinkpad loyalty that exists there is obviously disintegrating very quickly.

      Secondly, and more interestingly to me, are the numbers. There were 24 people in the pilot program, 22 of which responded to the survey. Of those 22, a whopping 19 actually preferred to keep running OS X on their Macbook instead of Windows on their THinkpad! That's pretty damn huge. 86% of

      • Firstly, IBM used to make the Thinkpad, and the pro-Thinkpad loyalty that exists there is obviously disintegrating very quickly.

        Okay I can see that as interesting, although it has been three years now.

        Secondly, and more interestingly to me, are the numbers. There were 24 people in the pilot program, 22 of which responded to the survey. Of those 22, a whopping 19 actually preferred to keep running OS X on their Macbook instead of Windows on their THinkpad!

        Why do you find that surprising? Among security professionals I know, that is below the normal switcher rate for those that try Apple machines (in my experience). In fact, that is lower than the switcher rate among engineers coming from Linux who tried it at my last company. The loyalty of people who try OS X is fairly legendary in the press and in the geek community.

        86% of a group of NEW users to OS X, given a time enough to get used to it, actually prefer PS X[sic] and the Apple hardware, to the software environment they were previously accustomed to and on their company's own developed hardware system to boot.

        Considering Apple's laptops are one of the few to consistentl

      • Were those 24 people randomly-selected to receive a Mac or did they ask to participate? If it's the latter, it's hardly surprising that people who specifically asked for a Mac said they wanted to keep it at the end of the trial.

  • The numbers are insignificant, but.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Tibor the Hun ( 143056 ) on Friday April 18, 2008 @12:28PM (#23119894)
    The numbers of testers may be insignificant compared to the IBMs whole workforce, but IBM is seeing the front line, and is adjusting itself.
    Think about it, they have a lot of IT savvy folks, who know a thing or two about operating systems. And especially Unix/Linux. Why would those folks be pushing for their competitor's platform (Microsoft) as opposed to staying truly cross platform compatible.

    The OS is becoming more irrelevant nowdays. Some folks at IBM are seeing that and adjusting accordingly.
    (And saving money on CALs to boot...)
    • Even when the OS was significant, there would have been good reason to use all three.

      The Mac has long excelled as a desktop publishing machine, for example. So you would expect the advertisers and some of the manual writers to use it.

      On the other hand, for information that is internal, you probably would want to use TeX and LaTex a majority of the time. For that, I'd suggest Linux.

      Likewise, Linux makes a good server system. It is more easily and cheaply repairable than other systems, and can be expanded

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by wass ( 72082 )
      The numbers, not included in the slashdot summary, are more interesting. 24 people took part in the pilot program, and these are new users to OS X. 22 responded to the survey, and 18 of the 22 actually prefer OS X over Windows (one felt they were equal, and 3 preferred Windows to OS X). Now when looking at these numbers, keep in mind they are new to OS X, and had to get over the learning curve.

      More interestingly, the 19 of 22 requested to keep using OS X on their Macbook instead of going back to Windows

  • Warning! (Score:3, Informative)

    by jdc180 ( 125863 ) on Friday April 18, 2008 @12:33PM (#23119980)
    In case you didn't know: RoughlyDrafted = Apple Fanboy Site.

  • Powerbook 2400c (Score:5, Informative)

    by argent ( 18001 ) <(peter) (at) (slashdot.2006.taronga.com)> on Friday April 18, 2008 @12:38PM (#23120048) Homepage Journal
    IBM has built Mac laptops before.

    The Powerbook 2400c was made for Apple by IBM Japan.

    I would assume that the group responsible ended up on the Lenovo side of the line, and I would love to see an Apple branded Thinkpad.

  • IBM and Apple, whodathunk it (PPC) (Score:5, Funny)

    by starglider29a ( 719559 ) on Friday April 18, 2008 @12:38PM (#23120050)
    Yeah, it's not like IBM ever made processors for a Mac [com.com]... oh, wait...

    What is more surprising is that they do this after Apple threw them over for Intel chips. Maybe it's one of those things where you get along better with yer Ex after the divorce than before.

    To appropriate "Married with Children":
    Peg: Would you rather have sex with A) Your wife...
    Al: B!

    where "your wife" = small values of Windows.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by wass ( 72082 )
      Your analogy fails to mention that IBM used to make the Thinkpad! Ie, the laptop that the people in the study gave up for the Macbook.

      Making the actual Thinkpad, is more of a draw than making the PowerPC chip that is used in Macs, as well as many other systems.

  • This is not really new (Score:4, Informative)

    by Dekortage ( 697532 ) on Friday April 18, 2008 @12:41PM (#23120100) Homepage

    In 1991, I was friends with a girl whose father worked at IBM's Armonk facility. He and several other researchers had Mac systems for some kind of graphic/visual analysis research, mostly IIci [wikipedia.org] and IIfx [wikipedia.org] systems. He had problems with System 7 [wikipedia.org], I was a Mac guy, and I had reason to impress the girl. So when I said I could fix his Mac, he invited me up to Armonk, and I fixed it.

    Didn't help much with the girl, but at least I got to visit a major IBM facility.

  • Conversely... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by fitten ( 521191 )

    One advantage cited: less reliance on Windows.


    Does this have a corresponding disadvangage of "more reliance on Apple"? Seriously... if an advantage of switching is less reliance on a single source, then more reliance on a different single source must be a disadvantage (regardless of who that single source is). This is one obvious place where OSS (and Linux) has an advantage.
    • It has a huge advantage. Next time MS threatens to raise the price of your Volume subscription, you threaten to move a few thousand more machines to linux or apple. They back down. Next time apple threatens to raise the prices of their software, you threaten to move a few thousand machines to windows. Many companies bitch about the costs of licensing, but its just bitching, since they don't see themselves as having a choice. IBM will have a choice, and can shop around to get the best prices.

  • So what? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by joeyblades ( 785896 )
    These kinds of pilots happen all the time, always with the same results...

    (1) The user experience with the Mac OS is generally high

    (2) The IT department decides that more Macs means less dependence on IT

    (3) Less dependence on IT means smaller empires for IT managers...

    Guess who gets to decide what users are allowed to have on their desktops...

  • Office 2008 and Macs? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Friday April 18, 2008 @01:07PM (#23120484)
    Here's a good question. Microsoft released Office 2008 for Mac,and surprisingly it doesn't come with VBA. This could be _the_ major problem with interoperability.

    Companies live and die on Excel macros that various pseudo-programmers have put together over the years. What was Microsoft thinking? Oh wait, I know... :)

    In all seriousness, this is a cool thing. Apple has finally started down the enterprise compatibility road, with all the AD hooks and such in Mac OS. Being a Windows admin though, one of the really nice (and really limiting) things about Windows clients + Windows servers is group policy. I can change every machine's IE settings in 15 minutes as opposed to copying down a new firefox config file. I can control almost every tweakable setting on a Windows machine from one location. What's the cross-platform answer for this?

    At this point, the central management piece and availability of apps are the two big questions. The other is having the IT department support another piece of hardware.
    • I am putting together puppet [reductivelabs.com] to manage our Debian boxes. It works with Linux and Mac OSX (according to the site, we don't have any Mac OSX machines for me to test the reality)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cens0r ( 655208 )
      Hey, I'm a real programmer... It's not my fault that someone saw the excel macro's I wrote to make my life easier and decided it would be good if everyone in the company started using it.
    • I'm an admin for a smallish company with four XServes that replaced our Linux/Irix combination and some 45 clients, most Mac, some Windows. We are in the middle of a cmopany wide upgrade to OSX 10.5 and Office 2008. I am a bit worried about Office 2008, as I've only heard really bad things about it, not only the VBA story, which is bad enough, but also that it is terribly slow and buggy.

      Some of the VBA shortcomings can be overcome with Applescript (the whole object model in VBA is represented as an Applescr
  • Finally... Gary Kildall's strategy is starting to pay off.
  • in MS's back is a good one for IBM.

  • Great! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Blakey Rat ( 99501 ) on Friday April 18, 2008 @01:19PM (#23120616)
    Now they should start a pilot program to reduce the Lotus Notes-related suicide rate. Perhaps a bottle of vicodin gets delivered to your desk every time the app starts up...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by chamont ( 25273 ) *
      They might as well ship that vicodin on a freight ship from the other side of the planet.

  • Poke around the site for a few minutes and it will be come really clear that Roughly Drafted is just some moron running a Microsoft hate blog. Chances are these "documents" are either made up or exaggerated.

    Let's stick to numbers and press releases when we start talking about market share and company's official positions on operating systems, not the musings of some apple-phile.

    Besides, we know that IBM quite plainly supports linux and unix. They're a top linux contributor:

    https://www.linux-foundation. [linux-foundation.org]

    • Re:Roughly Drafted is not a credible source (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF ( 813746 ) on Friday April 18, 2008 @02:23PM (#23121408)

      Poke around the site for a few minutes and it will be come really clear that Roughly Drafted is just some moron running a Microsoft hate blog. Chances are these "documents" are either made up or exaggerated.

      Can you cite a specific instance of Roughly Drafted posting fabricated documents in the past, or is this just an ad hominem attack?

      Let's stick to numbers and press releases when we start talking about market share and company's official positions on operating systems, not the musings of some apple-phile.

      Lets not.

      Besides, we know that IBM quite plainly supports linux and unix. They're a top linux contributor:

      How does IBM running a pilot program with OS X internally have anything to do with if they contribute to or support Linux?

      Chances are much greater they'll be using linux internally more and more as time goes on, not relying on yet another proprietary OS vendor they have no influence over.

      Since they're plainly in the process of doing this and since this was pointed out in the roughly drafted article, I don't see that your statement has any point.

      They probably use about as many macs internally as microsoft does- and that's not an ironic statement.

      They probably use fewer. What does that have to do with this article? It is about IBM testing Macs on their network (very useful for compatibility especially for their clients running mixed environments and possibly a sign of benefits for users of IBM solutions). It also talks about the preference for OS X over Windows by IBM employees. It's not surprising or anything, but that was the point stated, which you seem to have missed.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by MojoStan ( 776183 )

        Poke around the site for a few minutes and it will be come really clear that Roughly Drafted is just some moron running a Microsoft hate blog. Chances are these "documents" are either made up or exaggerated.

        Can you cite a specific instance of Roughly Drafted posting fabricated documents in the past, or is this just an ad hominem attack?

        I wouldn't go so far as saying RoughlyDrafted "made up" the "documents" like the GP did, but I don't think it's unreasonable for the GP to opine "chances are" Daniel Eran (RoughlyDrafted's writer) "exaggerated."

        Daniel Eran, who comments on Slashdot (in the third person) as DECS [slashdot.org], often submits his own RoughlyDrafted articles (in the third person) using pseudonyms like "peter deacon" [slashdot.org], "Redrum" [slashdot.org], and "rdmreader" [slashdot.org].

        Daniel Eran is also somewhat infamous for being banned from Digg because he tried to game their

  • Why I enjoyed reading this post. (Score:5, Informative)

    by 4g1vn ( 840279 ) on Friday April 18, 2008 @01:36PM (#23120836)
    More and more companies are starting to realize the Microsoft conundrum.
    1) How do we properly license upcoming products (Server 2008, SQL 2008, etc...)? Spend an eight hour session and you MAY figure it out.
    2) Let's standardize on a document format (.doc). OK, here comes Office 2007 with (.docx). WTF is that, and it's the default when saving a new document. Shame on you Microsoft.
    3) Vista promotion. It's better than XP, blah, blah, blah. No, it sucks, and was rushed to market. I use it (I'm forced) and very few of my network utilities work properly.
    Hats off to IBM for making a bold but, intelligent decision.

  • Unless they're planning on developing for the mac platform this really doesn't make much sense. Why dump one closed, DRM laden, overpriced desktop solution for another? This is IBM we're talking about. They could just as easily make an internal flavor of Linux that behaves like Leopard - or a completely new OS for that matter - if they really wanted to.

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