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IBM's Pilot Program For Internal Use of Macs
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Apr 18, 2008 12:10 PM
from the thinking-different-than-blue dept.
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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Why wouldn't an engineer want a Mac? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why wouldn't an engineer want a Mac? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Why wouldn't an engineer want a Mac? (Score:5, Funny)
We have a whole building full of Windows XP machines here using Active Directory. I won't say it's trouble-free, but...never mind.
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Re:Why wouldn't an engineer want a Mac? (Score:5, Funny)
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This shouldn't be a surprise! (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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Re:This shouldn't be a surprise! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:This shouldn't be a surprise! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This shouldn't be a surprise! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:This shouldn't be a surprise! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This shouldn't be a surprise! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:This shouldn't be a surprise! (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Mac vs Windows or really Mac versus Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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:3, Informative)
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:3, Informative)
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)
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.
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For Internal Application Only (Score:5, Funny)
(*rimshot* - I'm here all weekend, folks - try the veal)
Re:For Internal Application Only (Score:5, Funny)
The goatse guy actually started his career after he tried to use one of the original Mac portables internally.
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A few things to note (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, you can't.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
The numbers are insignificant, but.. (Score:5, Informative)
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...)
I'm surprised IBM hasn't been doing this already.. (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Warning! (Score:3, Informative)
Powerbook 2400c (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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.
This is not really new (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:This is not really new (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:This is not really new (Score:5, Funny)
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Office 2008 and Macs? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Great! (Score:4, Funny)
Why I enjoyed reading this post. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I thought it's a joke (Score:5, Insightful)
It's really not that strange-- it's not like the old days were Microsoft's OS is talked about as running on "IBM compatible computers". These days, Apple hardware isn't that different from anyone else's, so it's just a question of which operating system they want to run. Since IBM is so tied to Linux/Unix these days, it shouldn't surprise anyone that they're considering moving away from Windows.
I think the more ironic thing is that they're probably considering the move because Macs have become more popular since moving from PowerPC architecture to Intel's chips. To spell out the irony a little bit more, IBM started considering using Apple's computers (partially) as a result of Apple ceasing to use IBM's chips.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I thought it's a joke (Score:5, Insightful)
Combine that with the fact that they're almost certainly using Notes (rather than Exchange) for calendaring and email, and suddenly Windows is a very expensive choice for little benefit.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If that was all there was to it, why wouldn't they have stopped using Windows already?
These days, IBM is not interested in selling a desktop OS or even selling consumer-grade computers. They're essentially in the business of selling big iron and IT services, and they're often providing Unix/Linux solutions.
Whether they hate Microsoft or love Microsoft, it still makes a lot of sense that if you're providing Unix-based services, you'd also want to be using Unix-based client-machines. It would just be a be
Re:I thought it's a joke (Score:4, Informative)
I work at IBM in the super lab testing those Big Iron servers.
I *have* to use a windows workstation. They used to allow RHEL based workstations but stopped a short while before I started working here. I test predominantly Linux (RHEL and SLES) and occasionally Windows. We had to test Windows Server 2008 aka Longhorn (which amusingly is identified as Vista in virtually every piece of software).
Regarding the Unix vs. windows workstations: Apparently the developers here use windows workstations because when I tried to install a Linux utility all the shell scripts wouldn't run. Being the savy linux user I am I quickly realized that all the shell scripts were in windows format (with CRLF for line terminators instead of just LF). They were getting ready to SHIP this software out to enterprise level customers, but luckily we caught it.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I thought it's a joke (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd be surprised.
1) Individuals who may be in positions of power certainly can hold grudges.
2) Corporate culture is defined by the people in the company. Grudges held by old employees can infuse the corporate culture and wear off on new employees, reinforcing and propogating them.
Nothing that is blatantly unsound should get past the shareholders or its quarterly results fixated board, but when choosing between A and B when both are sound choices, the decision may come down to biases within the corporate culture.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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If the problem is reliance on Windows, then Linux is the solution, not an even tighter software and hardware lock-in.
The problem for IBM is being locked into Windows... or any other single solution. The answer is flexibility and making sure their software and services are cross platform so if they need to they can deploy Linux or OpenSolaris or NetBSD based appliances, or (more likely) a combination of all of the above. I seriously doubt IBM is going to become Apple's biggest customer, but it certainly makes sense for them to make sure they interoperate with OS X such that they can sell solutions to customers that inclu
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes OS X does have some strict software lock in then again no Apple product uses activation codes, that get lost, misused, or forgotten about by the Apple.
Would MSFt give up product activation if their software only ran on selected hardware? hardware that could run anything else anyways?
Re:That's it! I've had it... (Score:5, Insightful)
I am sick of everyone's smarmy afterglow about their switch to Mac after all the "terrible" experiences with PCs and Windows.
It is, however, very understandable. Users try OS X, realize some of the problems they've ben working around for years and no longer even think about are no longer problems. They get a bit crazy and try to understand why most people still use Windows and in the process can be very loquacious and annoying. It calms down after a few months or a year.
But as a network admin, I have better control and flexibilty with PCs and AD than any Mac I have handled, and I started my IT career on Macs. The latest OS for Mac is very pretty and whiz-bang, but getting integration into a predominantly Windows environment requires additional software purchases, extra configuration issues and more time/money overhead.
So you're saying your IT department standardized on solutions that locked you into one vendor, and now that users are demanding support for other vendors, your lack of foresight is biting you in the ass. Umm, maybe next time you should consider the future and flexibility as a feature so you don't have to purchase new software that handles the use case you did not consider.
Yes... you can access an smb share on Windows from a Mac, after you turn of digital signing and reduce your domain's security level.
It's called NFS. Any OS can use it. Why did you ignore the possibility of Mac or Linux or Solaris workstations when you picked a network file system?
Every Mac Lover I encounter has the same story, "I use it at home and it's so easy. I must use it in the office!" Douchebag!
Well why don't you just ask Microsoft to improve Windows. You're they're customer, surely any company you chose to do business with is responsive to your concerns as a customer, right? Oh wait, you chose to do business with an entire organization of douchbags you have repeatedly been convicted of crimes against their customers. Good choice there.
Looking at porn at home and synchronzing data from your laptop to a domain share for redundancy while having access to Group Policy management are NOT the same thing.
No they're not. Your job is to implement a solution for the latter that actually works for what your users want to do. You do realize IT is supposed to be about facilitating user needs, right?
And the next person who shows me how awesome Time Machine is has a three word answer from me: Volume Shadow Copy. Windows Server has had this feature since 2003.
Congratulations. You fundamentally misunderstood the ways in which Time Machine is innovative. I don't even use it, but I read the whitepaper. What kind of IT geek are you if you don't actually read up on new tech?
And any company worth its salt has good virus protection, spam blocking and border security in place.
What does this have to do with anything? Since when has border security stopped malware problems anyway? You seem about four to six years out of date when it comes to business security models.
Now here comes the Mac which can make use of none of those office level features.
The Mac can make use of plenty of those office level features, if you implemented a cross platform solution instead of locking yourself into one vendor. Man am I glad I haven't had to deal with vaguely incompetent IT people with Windows only skills for many years. Maybe you should take some courses at the community college or something.
5% market share does not good anti- virus make.
Maybe, maybe not. But whatever Apple has done, it works so far. Realistically, malware is not a problem for Macs at this time. In future that might change.
When there are enough of them out there, and bored German teenagers get busy, then let's talk about how secure Macs are.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Most viruses come from north and southeast Asia.
I'm not sure that this is relevant. Worms come from many sources and a great many are obviously not being deployed and exploited by people in Asia. The point is, if you have a Mac you have basically have a negligible chance of being compromised and claims that this is entirely due to market share is, well irrelevant to all the points I made, even if true.
Apple did only two things well with the iPod. The first is they marketed it supernaturally well and got everybody hooked on their cockamamie interface so they didn't want to use anything else.
iPods were the first portable players of this sort that were easily usable one handed. That was a pretty nice innovation. As for marketing, sure they'
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe NFS would have been a better choice, but I'm not going to apologize for making that decision.
You're the one complaining about the limitations of that choice.
And there are Mac clients for various virus and spam blocking systems.
Who claimed otherwise?
There is no reason to purchase Parallels and Mac/AD integration tools so someone can run email and Powerpoint on a differnt OS.
The AD issue would be your poor choice of MS's closed and intentionally incompatible clone of LDAP instead of, well LDAP. As for Powerpoint, you know MS makes MS Office for OS X right? Or you could use any one of a dozen alternative presentation packages.
Those work pretty well on a PC with Windows.
So you're claiming a broken version of LDAP designed to ony work with Windows, only works with Windows? And you're complaining that you don't know how to instal
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There is no reason to purchase Parallels and Mac/AD integration tools so someone can run email and Powerpoint on a differnt OS. Those work pretty well on a PC with Windows.
Hmmm, I'll have to agree with you on that one. There is no reason to purchase Parallels for those reasons since any competent IT administrator should know that Entourage and PowerPoint work pretty well on a Mac with MS Office for Mac. In fact Apple Mail will also work without a hitch if your Outlook server is half-decently configured.
Now that I think about it, you can simply turn on the IMAP service in the Outlook server and allow the people to use any mail client they want.
Anyway, the fact that you overlo
Re:Roughly Drafted is not a credible source (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you cite a specific instance of Roughly Drafted posting fabricated documents in the past, or is this just an ad hominem attack?
Lets not.
How does IBM running a pilot program with OS X internally have anything to do with if they contribute to or support Linux?
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 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.
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