Macs Gaining a Bigger Role In Enterprise

rev_media tips a short article up at InfoWorld giving some numbers on the increasing Mac presence in businesses. "We're seeing more requests outside of creative services to switch to Macs from PCs," notes the operations manager for a global advertising conglomerate. They "now [support] 2,500 Macs across the US — nearly a quarter of all... US PCs." Another straw in the wind: "Security firm Kapersky Labs has already created a Mac version of its anti-virus software for release should Mac growth continue (and the Mac thus [find] itself prey to more hackers)."

Macs Gaining a Bigger Role in the Enterprise

Well that's only because you can run LCARS in vmware now...

Re:Macs Gaining a Bigger Role in the Enterprise

Really? Can it emulate the bio-neural circuitry found on the NCC-1701-E, or am I stuck with old-school isolinear circuitry emulation? (or god forbid, duotronics?)

Re:Macs Gaining a Bigger Role in the Enterprise

You are stuck in the basement.

Low starting point

Well when you've got such a low starting point it's not hard to improve is it? i think this deserves a dilbert comic, something like marketing showing a 100% increase when they only sold 1 extra unit.

Re:Low starting point

You know, when they said that Macs were gaining a "bigger role in the Enterprise" I had a picture of a bunch of Macs installed on the bridge of a Federation starship. And this dialogue:

"Fire photon torpedoes!"

"I can't!"

"What's wrong, number one?"

"There's just a single mouse button! I can't right-click on the Klingon ship!"

"Dammit! Do a command-click!"

Fed up with MS

I think a lot of us really hoped that eventually people would really get what a mess Microsoft's products are and then OSS would really take off. Instead what I think is happening is that Apple may really see some growth.
 
I don't know if this means much but my department of 80-90 has gone from zero to about 20% mac in the last year. I don't see that adoption rate slowing down either. Now in the server room it is a mix - Windows, AIX and Linux. With Linux growing the fastest. But on the desktop I don't think anyone is full time Linux only. Even the Linux users all have a windows or apple machine.

Re:Fed up with MS

Free is just a feature. When I choose a computer or operating system, I weigh all the features, in proportion to their importance to me.

Free is nice, but I'd rather have a system that works well, and is compatible with the hardware and software I most care about.

as for the technical difference, well that is something you can of course never know, seeing as you can only know what free software technically is.

Aside from specific technical requirements for such assurance, what does it matter, in practice? Should I worry that I can't prove that Photoshop isn't setting the blur radius to 2.1 when I request 2.0? Is it important that I can't prove that iTunes isn't shuffling the songs randomly?

It's not Vista; it's W7 and beyond

Perhaps it's just IT people looking down the road and seeing the same thing some end users saw with XP:

Like many others, I didn't like where it seemed Microsoft was headed with Product Activation and DRM and decided that long-term, I would attempt to migrate away from Windows. I might not have as quickly if I hadn't gone into "creative services," but that was my thinking at the time.

I can imagine IT departments are now experiencing a similar sensation: Even if Vista (like XP) isn't a terrible thing in itself, it points toward a rather unpalatable future for the platform.

There is a slow but undeniable exodus underway. To Ubuntu and Fedora go the more technically focused, to MacOS go the more user-focused. Windows' arbitrary relevance becomes ever slightly moreso every day.

Re:It's not Vista; it's W7 and beyond

There is a slow but undeniable exodus underway. To Ubuntu and Fedora go the more technically focused, to MacOS go the more user-focused.

Not necessarily. I left Windows for Linux a decade ago, but switched from Linux to OS X a few years ago. I am not alone, I know many scientists and even whole science departments switching from Linux (or SunOS) to OS X. It has nothing to do with the presence or lack of technical skills, but IMHO it's just a better OS to get shit done on. And obviously many other technically-skilled scientists agree.

The ghost of Vista

I was thinking of buying a laptop some weeks ago but I was reluctant to use Vista. That was the initial thought that led me to buy a MacBook.

I use Windows XP at home and OpenBSD at work as desktop OS. I can't stand Linux as a desktop OS. Mac OS X seems like a perfect merge of a great GUI and the power of UNIX, running on solid, proven Intel hardware. With a Mac I have the best of both worlds.

OSX in 2008

This is the year of OSX on the desktop!!!!11

*cough*

Mac support in the Enterprise?

The article asserts in a couple of places some very amusing things: 1. Apple SAYS that it integrates cleanly in Active Directory environments. (In our experience, it doesnn't). 2. "That Apple Enterprise support doesn't exist is a popular myth." (We actually paid for Apple Enterprise support and work in a major metropolitan area. We and our VAR could actually never manage to locate Apple Enterprise support. I'm calling myth.) Admittedly, I'm writing this on my Macbook Pro with an Iphone in my pocket. Supporting a handful of macs is easy. Supporting hundreds is a major pain.

Re:I honestly donâ(TM)t want more market shar

thats right you can't be an elitist snob if everyone had one.

Make that two of us, Apple needs competition

My thoughts exactly, and it doesn't have anything to do with elitism. This will be a long post, so please bare with me.

First, a Disclaimer: I am a sysadmin in a shop that uses mostly Macs, and a few Windows Machines, and I've been using Macs since 1990 and OSX since the first public beta in 2000.

Second, Apple, like anything or anyone else, is as vulnerable to the abuse of a powerful position as, say IBM was in the 70s and 80s, and Microsoft has been up until now. Apple has already started showing signs of that abuse, which I'll now point out.

Third, Apple originally touted OS X as a very open Unix like variant. They had all sorts of technologies that were there to draw developers and Windows users to the platform. Built in Java and C/C++ APIs as first class development language along with Objective-C. As Apple became more comfortable with their position and had less fear of Developers being unwilling to move to the platform, the first dropped Java as a first class language (no more Java-Objective-C API bindings) two years ago, and last year dropped the C/C++ API's further development.

The net result of this is that if you want to develop a native 64 bit GUI application on OS X, you must use Objective-C. ObjC is a fine language, and now has Garbage collection, amongst other things, but it is very very difficult to port ObjC applications to other platforms. In a way, it's like Microsoft's .Net, except that there's not even an ObjC Mono to counter it.

This means huge costs of major software developers who have, for the most part, been developing in C/C++. Microsoft Office, Adobe CS3, Maxon Cinema 4D? They're all C/C++. There will be no 64 bit version of Adobe CS4, the next CS iteration, for OS X, Adobe has said. It will literally take them years to port their code base to ObjC. Personally, I wonder why they bother. Given that the Ubuntu Linux desktop is now very smooth, is getting fantastic reviews all around the net on mainstream publications, It would be a perfect time for Adobe and others to port their apps to Linux (with far less effort and far lower cost than porting to ObjC). Putting some of the money saved into a major marketing push for Linux would help the uptake.

It would also scare the living hell out of Steve Jobs (apart from making him go off on one of his major Ballmer-esque tirades again) and, it would force competition on Apple, which Apple seems to think is now unnecessary due to the major fuck up that is Windows Vista.

Fourth. Apple is almost wholly dependent on the final opinion of Steve Jobs. That is often very good, as the man has a sense of taste, unlike Steve Ballmer, who doesn't, but, because Steve Jobs is only human, that sometimes results in extremely poor decisions like the OSX 10.5 Leopard Desktop and GUI design. The default galactic image background is very bad for designers who need a neutral background to work on. The fact that Apple made the default Dock in 10.5 a weird faux 3D thing that is very difficult to use due to the changes, making it often very hard to see what applications are running. The new pop-up folders in the Dock are next to useless for most things, and the translucent Menu-bar could have only been a Steve Jobs decision, driven, like the 3D Dock by the perceived need to compete visually with Vista. Apple only offered changes to this when users rebelled in outrage.

Fifth. Apple's server offerings are to a large extent just wrappers around open source technologies. Their Open Directory is just a wrapper around OpenLDAP, SLAP, and a Berkley Database as data store. Their Email server is just Postfix for SMTP and Cyrus for IMAP. The problem is that due to the Apple GUI management bindings, it is next to impossible to customise these software packages. This is somewhat symptomatic of Apple's approach. They make some things very easy, but others very, very hard.

Apple needs competition. Without competition, Apple tends to lose their solid grounding and become a bit more like Microsoft, given to market lock-in and arbitrary decisions that make no sense.

Re:Make that two of us, Apple needs competition

The Cocoa-Java bridge was dropped because hardly anybody was using it. There's no way it would have been cost effective for Apple to continue to update it.

The "C/C++" apis you were referring to, more commonly known as the Carbon api, is a slightly sanitized version of the Classic Mac OS programming interface. They were old and ugly, and Carbon had to retrofit them with support for things like preemptive multitasking and memory protection. Anybody who considered Carbon as anything but a legacy api was a fool. (Yes, that includes Adobe.)

You don't seem to be aware of CoreFoundation and Objective-C++, which provide C and C++ respectively with access to most of the Cocoa apis. But I get the feeling that you're deliberately ignoring the fact that Apple has added Cocoa bindings for Python and Ruby.

And you definitely should have mentioned GNUStep, a portable environment that is compatible with OpenStep (from which Cocoa is derived) and has included many of the improvements from Cocoa. If you actually want your app to be portable, it is very easy to write it using GNUStep as the lowest common denominator. The resulting app can then be compiled and run on Windows, Linux, and OS X.

Re:Make that two of us, Apple needs competition

As Apple became more comfortable with their position and had less fear of Developers being unwilling to move to the platform, the first dropped Java as a first class language (no more Java-Objective-C API bindings)

They had built in the bridge at great cost in the early years, and it was a major part of their developer push. You can imagine their frustration when no one used it; this is the Cocoa bridge, mind you, not the Java platform. People code in Java so they can write once and run anywhere, not so they can code platform-dependent GUI code. Apple thought having a Java bridge might drive people to write software that favored their platform, but Java devs just kept on using Swing and AWT, and generally ignoring the bridge, since it was platform-dependent.

I think the nail in the Java bridge's coffin was that you couldn't do key-value coding in Java, the way Apple implemented it, because you sorta need duck typing to make it work. Objective-C can do this, Java cannot (though the Java people hold this is a good thing.)

last year dropped the C/C++ API's further development.

This is a tricky statement, as CoreAudio, the File Management APIs, OpenGL, QuickTime, Core Foundation, Core Services, and, hell, the Kernel API and BSD subsystem are all "C APIs" and a part of the OS X platform [apple.com], and they are all continuously being refined and extended; though not all of them are 64 bit yet, this doesn't pose much of a limitation on OS X since you can call from 64 bit code into 32 and back "for free." The Carbon API, particularly the UI code, has not been rebuilt for 64 bit and may not ever, but it is not "unsupported" or "deprecated."

Your statement makes it appear that coding in C on OS X is somehow unsupported, or that ObjC is the only Kool-Aid in town, and this is a flagrant canard.

There will be no 64 bit version of Adobe CS4, the next CS iteration, for OS X, Adobe has said. It will literally take them years to port their code base to ObjC. Personally, I wonder why they bother. Given that the Ubuntu Linux desktop is now very smooth, is getting fantastic reviews all around the net on mainstream publications, It would be a perfect time for Adobe and others to port their apps to Linux

They're probably in the same spot MS is, in that even they don't know how their code works any more, with the number of people they've had working on it over the years.

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

Nah, according TFA, you don't need Mac tech skills:

After all, as Publicis' Plavin notes, Macs -- which cost the same as equivalently configured business-class PCs -- are cheaper to support because they are easier to support.

To which I might add, "Citation Needed".

I'm a recent Mac switcher with years of Windows experience. It's not all that easy to get OS X to work and play well with Active Directory and Windows networking (or maybe it's the other way around). IT lets me play with the Mac because I'm pretty self sufficient. Most enterprise OS X users aren't going to be particularly savvy - they'll need lots of help (like always).

And finally, the cynic in me wonders how many of those Macs are really running XP / Vista under boot camp while at work... Not that there is anything wrong with that. You'll look cool and all, even if you're running the same dorky programs as everyone else.

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

You can cite me: our company has moved 80% mac since 2004. That resulted in 50% cut of IT support personnel, because there simply isn't that much to do. And 80% of the work for the remaining IT support personnel is dealing with the remaining 20% of Windows installations (most of which are a few experts' desk/laptop machines).

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

It has never occurred to me until your post that Macs may be resisted in the enterprise due to job security.

Somewhere the Maytag man is yawning.

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

If so, they're not using them right. Macs are a pain in the ass to administer. They're great for end users, so you do avoid some of the stupid calls once you've answered EVERY question about why they are different than Windows. However, Apple's server product is an abomination. They change behavior with OS updates and you have to buy new versions to get security patches as they phase out after about 2 versions. If you consider the difference in the OS release schedule between windows and Mac OS, it is much more expensive for small deployments. If anything happens to your open directory setup, Apple will tell you to start over. If you're lucky, you were smart enough to export your users so you only have to reset the password for everyone! Combine with that fun things like php not having any modules that are common, lack of java 6, and random crashes with Leopard Server, and you have one of the most annoying products I can think of. The only useful thing about OS X server is the control over client systems. That is why you buy it. At work, we have a FreeBSD webserver because we couldn't get NFS mounting to work consistently between two xserves. The FreeBSD machine has much better uptime and it's a beater Dell Precision 1.4Ghz POS. In apple happy land, you're supposed to use dynamic AFP mounts for everything. It sucks when you're trying to serve web pages! Best of all, if a Leopard client connects to a 10.4 server, it sets an ACL on the home directory to explicitly block access by everything but the user thus blocking serving web pages! (if the user uses their webspace, it's mapped to a ~/Sites directory) I suggest anyone looking at doing Mac deployments consider buying a real server to go with it. It could be BSD, Linux, Windows Server, even Solaris. The problem with Macs is their inflexibility. It's great from a user perspective because it's hard to get into trouble, but when you're trying to work magic common on Windows or *NIX installs... Yes, I'm the Mac sys admin for a university computer science department.

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

Nah, according TFA, you don't need Mac tech skills:

After all, as Publicis' Plavin notes, Macs -- which cost the same as equivalently configured business-class PCs -- are cheaper to support because they are easier to support.

To which I might add, "Citation Needed".

I'm a Mac system admin. You're right and wrong. Macs tend to behave better under stress than Windows does, but there are many problems on OSX, a number of which are related to, very much as in Windows, legacy PPC stuff running under the Rosetta emulator. Apart from which, just as in Windows, if users are allowed to load their machines with crapware, they become unstable

I'm a recent Mac switcher with years of Windows experience. It's not all that easy to get OS X to work and play well with Active Directory and Windows networking (or maybe it's the other way around). IT lets me play with the Mac because I'm pretty self sufficient. Most enterprise OS X users aren't going to be particularly savvy - they'll need lots of help (like always).

Again, you're right and wrong. The Mac users in our company, which has become 80% Mac in the last two years, tend to manage the basic things much better than the Windows users, but they run into problems in the more complex things. I think the Mac is genuinely easier to use for beginners, but more advanced stuff, like LDAP binding, network homes etc are totally beyond their grasp, for the most part.

And finally, the cynic in me wonders how many of those Macs are really running XP / Vista under boot camp while at work... Not that there is anything wrong with that. You'll look cool and all, even if you're running the same dorky programs as everyone else.

The only Mac users in our company who use Windows, are me, so that I can provide support, and the users who have apps that only run on Windows, like CAD stuff.

You're kidding, right?

They've already made the mistake of not allowing open source software on the iPhone (one of the many reasons I don't get one)

Are you being sarcastic? Nowadays it's difficult to say. I have just finished to watch Steve Jobs' keynote [apple.com] about the brand new iPhone SDK, which is a heck of a platform for development, either proprietary or open source, and the App Store that will let you distribute your application to every iPhone on Earth.

I'm not sure what's wrong with those Mac bashers around. You know, just stating to not want to be a "Mac fan" because you like tactile response is stupid for itself. Intel based Macs running UNIX plus open source software and a great set of development tools is anything a geek that respects him/herself wants to get his/her hands on.

And before anybody mods me down, I'm not a Mac fanboy. I've been programming for Windows, Unix and Unix-likes (Linux, OpenBSD) on Intel and SPARC for years and never owned a Mac until recently (two weeks ago aprox.) and I'm amazed. I'm currently writing this message from Safari while whatching my terminals (cloning repositories, building software, the usual stuff.)

Richard Stallman need not apply here.

I know this is dangerous to say on Slashdot and all but here goes.

You are VASTLY overstating the importance of open source on a mobile platform such as the iPhone. Its a friggin $500 phone. You think the masses who are buying it are going to care if they can use open source software on it or not? The big draw of the device is its interface and ease of use. You can release zero cost programs via the AppStore if you want and to the user thats really all that matters. The vast majority of the computing using public can't program to begin with so whether its open source or proprietary is wholly irrelevant.

You asked to be corrected...

Don't kid yourself. Linux is potentially as vulnerable as other operating systems. Reports [slashdot.org] say that rootkitted linux machines serve as botnet controllers. Keeping linux machines patched for security is necessary, too.

I didn't say any OS came perfectly safe

You saying that Windows can be secured does not diminish the fact that over a million Windows boxes are compromised right now. No useful system that's connected to the network can be made perfectly secure, but that doesn't mean that some are not better than others.

Again, Linux and osX don't have any viruses in the wild. Zero. None. Not one. Zip. Nada. On these operating systems antivirus is to protect you, the feeble Windows client of the mail server. The Linux malware ecosystem is almost the exclusive purview of nation-states and their clandestine operatives, megacorporations and their industrial spies. Securing your linux box is important, but these people aren't generally interested in common folk.

Windows has hundreds of thousands of viruses in the wild. These viruses support the financial interests of spammers, identity thieves, Nigerian scam artists, mail order fraudsters. Their ecosystem includes money launderers, extortionists, blackmailers thugs and hit men. There are incredible toolchains that take a found vulnerability and turn it into an exploit plugin for distribution by their botnets and compromised websites in mere hours. There are marketplaces where the proceeds of spying on your Windows box and the tools to compromise your windows are bought and sold. The ecosystem also consists of various members on the white hat side including antivirus vendors, penetration experts, firewall vendors, malware blockers and anti-phishing toolbars. Then there's the grey area group who sell with irritating popups products that do absolutely nothing, but give users a false sense of security -- opening them up to exploitation. These industries generates several billions of dollars a year in profits.

No antivirus catches 100%. The virus infrastructure in a thriving stew that's updated minute by minute to stay ahead of the AV companies. For the most part the latest and most successful viruses are used. Once your PC is infected they pretty much can do anything with it they want to including:

• monitor your keyboard and watch your screen
• remotely control your PC
• read all your mail and your personal files
• transfer any file back to their mesh storage, or publish it online
• use your computer to attack other computers
• use your disk to store illicit materials (stolen data, porn including kiddie porn, warez, movies and music)
• use your computer (if it's connected directly to the net) to serve the above data to other people for a fee
• send spam

They can do all of that without your knowledge or consent of course. They are actively doing this to over a million Windows users right now. Are you one of them?

People can choose. The operating systems with no viruses or the ones with hundreds of thousands. It's their choice.