The Mac In the Gray Flannel Suit

oDDmON oUT points us to a BusinessWeek story about the increasing use of Apple products in the corporate sector. Many companies are finding that their employees are pushing for the transition more than Apple itself. Quoting: "While thousands of other companies scratch and claw for the tiniest sliver of the corporate computing market, Apple treats this vast market with utter indifference. After a series of failed offensives by the company in the 1980s and 1990s, Chief Executive Steve Jobs decided to focus squarely on consumers and education customers when he returned to Apple in 1997. As a result, the company doesn't have ranks of corporate salespeople or armies of repairmen waiting to respond every time a hard drive fails. He believes it's difficult for any company, including his, to be effective at satisfying both corporate buyers and consumers."

Server is not quite there yet..

Now if only Apple would get their shit together when it comes to their server products. Anyone who has had to administer OS X 10.5 Leopard Server knows that the entire release was a complete gong show. From crashing AFP and directory services, to a half-implemented calendaring solution, a laughably broken server administration GUI (I mean, who would want to mark reverse zones as transferable _anyway_), and countless other problems... Microsoft , Red Hat, SuSE and Ubuntu are just walking all over them when it comes to the server offering.

Sure the Apple stuff is integrated and works for the basic case. However, if you try to move past what is written in the sparse user manual, you not only lose support for your basic "AppleCare" but also have to spend time figuring out how Apple has mangled the pieces of the open source offerings that hold their stuff together.

That all being said, I think with some work and polish the server side of things could really become a viable solution. It's just not quite there yet. This is coming from someone who administers these things for a living...

Re:Server is not quite there yet..

Now if only Apple would get their shit together when it comes to their server products.

Or conversely they could get out of the server market entirely. They do the consumer electronics thing very very well. They should continue to focus and improve on that, let some other company do the server thing well. Trying to be "all things computer" is a mistake. Apple has done well by ignoring the corporate world, and they should continue to do so. If they happen to have some proprietary architecture that would be a wonderful blessing to the server market, they can always lease the rights to Cisco.

Re:Why not just use BSD then?

Sounds like someone who's a) never used OS X server and b) never had to wrangle OpenLDAP, Kerberos, Samba, and SASL on a regular Linux server.

It's fine to say, stick with BSD or Linux, but they only ship with pieces of the puzzle, not integrated at all. This is especially apparent in the Directory Services area. Sad to say but nothing except Apple's offering comes close to competing with ActiveDirectory. OpenLDAP itself is great (and we use it to serve up information on thousands of users), but it's just one piece. Then you have Kerberos, Samba (with its own password schemes), SASL Authd, Radius, etc. With BSD and OpenLDAP, Kerberos, and Samba, you can get it working pretty well but you still have to deal with changing passwords in two or more places, different password expiry schemes that all have to be kludged together sometimes with spit and baling wire.

Apple's solution, on paper, is more ideal. Directory Services exports both an authentication layer and an authorization layer, welded together in a common API and common admining tools. Change the user's password and the password server, which integrates SASL, Kerberos, NTPassword, and LMPassword hashes, everything, no matter what protocol, keeps everything in sync. There are no passwords stored in LDAP at all, which is as it should be. Samba, PAM, SASL clients, etc, all talk to the password server. Contrast this with most LDAP installations on nix. There's a userPassword field, which can have any number of hash types in it. Then there's the shadowAccount attributes for password expiry. Then there's sambaNtPassword, and SambaLMPassword fields with their own hashes. Then there's Kerberos off to the side, never really integrated (except for certain kinds of SASL binds). It's honestly a mess. I hope that in the future, other products like Fedora Directory will take care of many of these problems. Samba 4 certainly will be a huge leap forward. One which I hope (with it's integrated LDAP system) will finally compete with ActiveDirectory.

In short, what Apple has done with OS X Server is a tantalizing idea of what we could do in the *nix server space if we put our minds to it. Sadly Apple's solution is lacking in many areas including just being half-baked and their enterprise support is non-existent. They have also never published their APIs to develop pam-DirectoryService and nss-DirectoryService for conventional Unix OS's, either, which is very short-sighted. So Apple's solution has promise, but tends to fall down outside of the base cases. But the standard alternatives are also very bad.

Great for Entrepeneurs

So having this gap in the market for corporate mac support really opens up the possibilities for businesses to spring up and take advantage of these needs. Apple authorizes repair shops so they can repair systems under applecare... one problem is that a lot of things aren't supported under applecare and applecare is only valid for 3 years after the purchase date.

All it would take is a shop to stock up on parts, offer extended care, data recovery and on-site services. In Manhattan there are a couple of shops that offer some of this, but they are mostly targetting users who don't want to ship their machine to apple or need a quick answer for unsupported systems (TekServe and others), but I don't feel that they are taking advantage of the corporate market.

I, being one of two apple users in my department, have realized that although apple has added the capability to join a windows domain, the SSO support is lacking and there are a couple of shortcomings in their implementation. Running a mac in a windows environment isn't quite as seemless in some critical places (SSO, as I said, but also browsing the network, connecting to sharepoint and if the network is flakey or goes down, logging back into the machine can take a long time if the machine has trouble communicating with the directory server). OSX also offers no default lock-screen option like windows does... Although you can have it "show login window" from the fast users witching menu, activating that with the keyboard requires 3rd party add-ons. I use Quicksilver's FastLogout option.

Re:Great for Entrepeneurs

OSX also offers no default lock-screen option like windows does

Open Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access. Select Preferences, Show Status in Menu Bar.
Now anytime you want to lock the screen, just click on the padlock up by the clock and select Lock Screen.
This will require a password to exit the screen saver, even if you have your screen saver not set to require password.

I use Quicksilver's FastLogout option

FYI, fast user logout sans QuickSilver is Shift-Opt-Cmd-Q. (you have to hold the keys about 1/3 second)

Re:Great for Entrepeneurs

It's not just for the hardware though. One of the bigger problems pointed out in TFA is that his Jobness just won't tell anyone where Apple is going. No roadmap (other than the cheesy map for the iPhone on the current Apple homepage). No ability to plan years ahead. Just do what Steve says.

Of course, it's not like Microsoft sticks to their roadmaps. But having a plan is comforting to Enterprise-types.

And yeah, they need to improve an OS X client to hook into a AD network. That should be relatively easy (even Microsoft did it).

Unfortunately

The "all it would take" bit is huge. Slashdotters frequently have no idea just how big some of the things that they regard as trivial in fact turn out to be. A corporate basically wants to see long term stability from its outsourced support, along with years of experience and huge economies of scale. So you build that and wait three years for the corporate replacement cycle to click in - but when it does, you have been bankrupt for nearly 3 years. It is simply not possible to scale such a business because it is very expensive per seat to provide high quality support in niche markets.

My consultancy is currently working with several support companies who are starting to change their offered product mix. You would simply not believe how slow it is as the culture has to change, the training has to take place, the systems have to evolve. In my view, Apple is right to stay out. Eventually the wheel will turn and the fashion will revert to in house support. Then they will be in with a chance.

APPLE HAS NO MID-RANGE HEAD LESS DESKTOPS!

And a lot of corporate users are on mid towers they also like to reuse displays from older systems and like to swap out hard disks / not have to send them off to have them replaced.
The imac / mini are not that easy to be opened up and you can void the warranty by doing so. They also don't have send off a hard disk with data on it. HP and others let's you keep the bad hard disk and get a new one.

also the mini is not a good buy next to other systems at the same price and the mac pro is over kill for most users. AIO do not fit in to corporate use of systems and other AIO out there make it a lot easier to swap out HDD's as well.

A good $700-$2100 mid tower will be a nice fit in a corporate setting.

There laptops can use some work as well like an 15" screen at $1200-$1900 not $2000 and up.

Re:APPLE HAS NO MID-RANGE HEAD LESS DESKTOPS!

I've been at a handful of Fortune 500 companies and my experience is exactly the opposite of yours. The desktop computer is dead, replaced by laptops which have lower TCO's and offer a better ROI. Apple would be wasting their time to build a mid-tower for this market as this market is small and getting much smaller.

What Apple really needs to compete in the corporate laptop market is a laptop dock. Most laptop users are sporting external monitors, mice, scanners, external storage and keyboards these days. Not having an easy way to hook and unhook all of that stuff twice a day is a deal killer.

Secrecy is going to kill them

as touched on in the article, Apple is overly secretive on new upcoming things. This is not what companies want. I work in an IT department and I've seen what both IBM and sun have coming in the next few years. Its called a non-disclosure. This helps my bosses shape future purchasing requirements, because they know whats coming ahead of time, versus a big flashy presentation at a conference and it being available in afew days.

Apple has to realize if they want to compete, they need to open up a bit to their larger buyers. Yes, the consumer market is great, but now that users are becoming apple savvy, you want them to have the opportunity to bring it to their workplace. Its a similar thing happening with Linux. My bosses were very anti Linux, but the latest batch of graduates have so much experience with it, its being rolled into our environment. You get people using it at home/school and they will want it at work.

Hard choice to justify

What is the real requirement that would make you pick Macs over Linux or Windows?

Excluding creative firms, most companies have a really short list of genuine requirements. Track a few gigabytes worth of numbers (total, across the company), deal with e-mail, exchange a few documents. You don't exactly need expose to do an accounts receivable reconciliation or fill out a goods received note yet _these are the things that most computer users do in most companies_.

Once you take user preference out of the equation what genuine benefits does Apple really offer? Linux offers commodity hardware sourcing plus no software overhead. Windows offers the same hardware advantage and conformity with the rest of the market. After you amortize setting up a standard, well locked down image over 10k+ users are the costs of that really different enough to be significant?

What companies should be doing is deploying Macs where they could really have some benefit. I'm sure that there are some people who need access to things like FCP at work are suffering an old Windows XP box with inadequate tools. But for every 1 of those people there are 20,000 people who right now are tapping out yet another form debt collection letter and could do it just as easily from a $200 box running Linux.

Re:Hard choice to justify

What is the real requirement that would make you pick Macs over Linux or Windows?

1. Ease of use.

2. Reliability, both HW and SW. (See my earlier posting on HW experiences.)

3. NO fscking viruses, spyware, etc to worry about. (When there's a real threat -and- a counter shown to be -safe and effective-, I'll buy it. Until then, no point screwing up the machine with anti-virus software that doesn't protect against any serious threats...)

4. Expertise on the platform. I can use Windows, but I'm much better on the Mac for GUI-like things, and when I need to, there's always the Terminal for all the Unix commands I know. (And Aquamacs is my preferred text editor, a great Mac port of Emacs...)

5. Ease of customization. This is related to ease of use, but is worthy of a comment itself. I can set things up the way I want to, in part because of the Mac's support for doing so, and in part because the corporate IT Nazis don't understand them well enough to prevent me... Don't get me started on Corporate IT departments, whose primary goal it seems to be to make everyone else's jobs harder to make their jobs easier; the opposite of 'service'...

6. Software/Hardware investment. I have -a lot- of stuff for the Mac, both commercial and shareware. Duplicating that in Windows would cost more than the computer itself.

When I changed jobs, I told my new boss that I did not want to use Windows. He responded, "Look, you get what makes -you productive-. You're the one making money for the company, not corporate IT."

All this dates to before the Intel Mac and the rise of virtualization. I have -one- customer application that I'm required to run on Windows. I also have occasional problems opening supposedly compatible Microsoft documents created on Windows Office on the Mac (but NewOffice usually opens them when Mac Office crashes... Go figure!)

I still don't understand why IT departments pay $$$$ for Exchange Server when the Open Source/Open Standards alternatives are
    (a) A LOT cheaper
    (b) A LOT more reliable

dave

Macs are here.

I work at a MAJOR cable television network, based in Atlanta, with branch offices all over the country and about to be global. Our in-house Mac inventory has only been steadily increasing over the last few years and is expected to go even higher in the next budget. Whole departments are switching to MacBook Pros, en masse, and not just the "creatives". Even the engineering department is switching over to Mac, as most of their applications have OS X versions or they BootCamp/VMWare Windows if need be. Even Blackberries are being supplanted by iPhones, since the recent patch allowing Exchange integration and the next version of the device being fully Exchange compatible (according to our Apple vendor).

From a support standpoint, the transition is a little rougher, as others here have noted, but the company is paying to have their support staff become Apple certified techs (myself included) in order to do the work in-house and keep our warranties intact.

The server side is also increasing, for the specific purpose of running the data ingest software used to manage clips for our HD transition.

Some of us have even messed around with the hacked OS X kernals floating around and I can report that it runs BEAUTIFULLY on a Dell GX520. If companies like Psystar are indeed a harbinger of things to come, I see Apple's market share in the corporate environment only continuing to rise.

Mac hardware usually superior, not inferior...

...finally someone gets it. Yeah, there have been disasters like the ATI GPU in iBook G3 debacle, and the explodey battery debacle, but Dell has hardware disasters too and so does everyone else. Macs usually are built with the best parts that Apple can get their hands on. Everyone else cheaps out and you are left with leaky capacitors after a couple of years use or other crap like that. The only other company who has been really good on quality parts was IBM when they still designed and made ThinkPads and enterprise desktops. (not Aptiva or the i-series ThinkPads, you can blame Acer for that) Lenovo has taken the brand and dragged it down to the same crappy level as everyone else (Used a Lenovo ThinkPad lately? PU!) but mas o menos Apple has kept the brand up. I've had a very happy MacBook since 2006...finest computer I've ever owned.

Dear Apple

My company bought a white Macbook for me about 6 weeks ago, it arrived with broken internal speakers. The nice kids at the Mac store ordered the parts and said to bring the machine in for a quick fix. Being all cool and slack, the Apple store does not take appointments, so I brought the machine in last nite to see if they could fix it. The nice technician told me it would take 1-2 days and there was nothing to speed the process. This Macbook is my work machine, it's not for school or personal use - it's part of a (small, agile) global enterprise that runs 24/7 and I can't be without it for that long. HP and Dell send technicians onsite to service problems like this, no questions asked. It's like pulling teeth to get repairs out of your people. Until you figure out how to fit into business customer's needs, you will self-limit your reach.

Of the 4 new Macs I've worked on in the past year, 1 Macbook, 3 silver towers, 3 of the machines had hardware problems out of the box or within 1 week of unpacking. Specifically the broken speakers and dead Firewire ports. FIX YOUR QA PROBLEMS, CUPERTINO.

In the meantime I will be recommending HP, Lenovo or other for laptops and desktops.

Sincerely,
A Burned Customer.

PS - why is it called the "Genius Bar" if they are such idiots about these things?

Re:Repairing em'

I can't imagine what it would be like


I'm sorry you have no imagination. Here's some help:

My wife's shiny white plastic iMac (3 years old) died on Thanksgiving. I took it to the nearest Apple store the next day, the busiest shopping day of the year. They replaced the power supply for free. I was in the store for half an hour.

I now have a mac, too.

Re:Repairing em'

You went to the Apple store and had it fixed? This is why Slashdot is no fun any more.

Where's the story about using a Dremel, an old VCR, a soldering iron, and a Perl script to fix it yourself?

Shouldn't be expensive

If one desktop computer being down a whole day is very expensive, you might want to reconsider your business organisation.

Every company I was in (and that ranges from the very small to humongous worldwide behemoths) had a couple spares at the department level.

And you surely wouldn't store your critical data on one desktop?

/and don't call me Shirley

Re:Repairing em'

Not sure how you could do better than a day. We get next day from Dell, and we pay a lot for that coverage. Spend five minutes answering the usual questions (capacitors budging? LEDs flashing? Did you try turning it off and on again?), and the next day I receive either a power supply, a mother board or one a new drive via UPS. Return old part in same box and never give it another thought.

Blackberrys, OTOH, just get wiped and returned to RIM. I would think you would do that with a Mac, too. I wouldn't even know how to open one up, and if I did manage to get it open I'd feel the same way I feel when I look under the hood of any modern vehicle. Where's the damn carburetor?

So I guess the question for me would be does Mac offer a next day replacement service, and what does it cost? We'll leave aside for now what to do about the proprietary, Windows only software that our customer base compels us to use.

Re:Repairing em'

Where's the damn carburetor?

On a Mac it's right between the flux capacitor and the dilithium crystal matrix.

Re:Repairing em'

Shiny white is relatively easy. When you get to the shiny black ones, there you have trouble. All the parts are behind the LCD panel, which is behind the display bezel, which is behind that really thin large sheet of glass.

(that's 21 screws, five cables, two suction cups, and 15 minutes to get past)

And care to imagine how difficult it can be to keep from getting a spec of lint between that glass and LCD panel when servicing it?

Re:Repairing em'

3-step process for repairing Macs:

1. Throw away defunct Mac
2. Buy new Mac
3. Profit!!!

Re:Repairing em'

We support 3 Macs out of 200 computers in our labs. We used to have a lab full of them, but nobody ever used it.

Apple's warranty service is execrable. We had one machine sit there broken waiting on a new motherboard for 6 months.

The replacement motherboard gave out last month (the extended warranty expired last year), and we had to take it down to the Apple store, because we can't just buy a replacement part like we could for a PC.

Macs are just fine for personal use, but Windows is far better in a lab environment. It's easier to administrate, reasonably easy to keep secure, and very easy to buy hardware and software for.

Games moving off computers

Apple is not focused there because that need is being rapidly assumed by consoles.

Some console games even support mouse/keyboard for FPS control.

With HD TV even just at 720p, you have resolution that is acceptable to just about anyone, and you don't have to do all the work of updating drivers and such - the platforms handle updates quite well as to the games.

Re:Send in the clones

From The Desk Of Steve Jobs, Apple Inc

Dear Slashdot Member 122034 ("Animats"),

It has been brought to my attention that you understand my business better than I do.

As you know, Slashdot is full of people who have far more opinions than money and far more enthusiasm for offering their opinions than for doing any real work.

Of course, I have no reason to believe that you are one of these foolish, idle creatures that can be seen pontificating on Web sites every minute of every day while able-minded people are accomplishing things.

Congratulations on having brilliant, instantaneous insights into my own affairs that I can only begin to understand after spending more than half my life in the computer industry and running one of the most successful electronics companies in the world.

I've instructed my assistants to alert me to any future guidance that you have time to offer.

Sincerely,

Steve Jobs