The Mac In the Gray Flannel Suit 392
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."
Re:Repairing em' (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Great for Entrepeneurs (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
You can also go to System Preferences, Accounts and turn on fast user switching.
/Mikael
Re:Repairing em' (Score:1, Informative)
In a business environment "one whole day" of downtime can be very expensive.
Re:Why not just use BSD then? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Server is not quite there yet.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Repairing em' (Score:3, Informative)
Apple Customer Service explained by the boss . . . (Score:3, Informative)
Apple vs. Java http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/03/1929212 [slashdot.org]
Apple Safari not ready for primetime (no anti-phishing) http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/03/2049205 [slashdot.org]
iphone SDK http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/16/1435254 [slashdot.org] and http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/08/1932232 [slashdot.org]
their treatment of Adobe (loss of Photoshop CS4 64bit) http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/04/1247246 [slashdot.org]
need I go on? And I only went back a month!
True Apple believers will stick their heads in the sand and ignore this long running trend of contempt for customers, but enterprises do notice, and remember bad behaviors from their suppliers. Until the corporate culture changes (and evidently this belief comes from the top) Apple does not belong in the enterprise.
Re:Dear Apple (Score:3, Informative)
Under "Genius Bar Reservations", select from the popup-button a state & store.
Re:Why not just use BSD then? (Score:4, Informative)
Please don't keep repeating that myth. OS X is built on a Mach core, with some bits and pieces of BSD hacked into it. And OS X has serious incompatibilities to BSD. If you're trying to use a BSD server with OS X clients, you have your work cut out for you.
Re:Mac OS X is a usable Unix with integrated hardw (Score:3, Informative)
http://us.shuttle.com/KPC/ [shuttle.com]
Re:Repairing em' (Score:2, Informative)
I can tell them exactly what the issue is right away, and they'll still make me go through all the tests to prove that what I'm telling them is in fact the problem. We have 4 hour service from them, yet, that 4 hours doesn't count until after they acknowledge what the problem is, it's not 4 hours from when you say you have a problem.
Also, for servers that we have next day service on, they also like to make you wait on the phone just past their shipping deadline for the day, so that you don't actually get the parts until two days later.
Re:Great for Entrepeneurs (Score:3, Informative)
Hrm?
Preferences > Security > "Require Password to Wake this computer from sleep or screen saver"
You can change the keyboard shortcut for sleeping the screen to Windows-L if it makes you feel better. I find setting a hot corner to be faster.
Re:Dear Apple (Score:5, Informative)
I've worked at several companies that use Dell, HP, and Apple machines. We don't get any onsite service from any of them. When a machine breaks, we give the user a spare and ship the broken one back to the company. If the machine is functional enough, we migrated the data and config to the spare (where practical). I'm sure for big iron, this is different, but not for end user systems.
Your anecdotes are great and all, but according to objective, independent testing Apple hardware has lower failure rates for both laptops and desktops than, well any other major OEM. The only one close is Sony. We all have hardware problems occasionally, but I'm going to have to go with an objective, formal study from Consumer Reports and backed up by several other companies, when deciding which vendor has a QA problem.
Congrats on recommending hardware with lower reliability based upon your lack of research. P.S. Strangely Dell laptops are actually near the top of the heap for reliability, a big change from about a year ago. Hopefully anyone really making purchasing decisions for a living will actually do their homework.
Re:Repairing em' (Score:3, Informative)
Two weeks later my Macbook Pro died (still 6 months old), and it took them 3 weeks to fix it. 1.5 out of the three weeks it spend sitting around in the service center next to the replacement logic board, because they were apparently too busy to do the max. 1h repair on a "professional" macbook.
My next laptop won't be a mac.
Former AppleCare perspective... (Score:2, Informative)
For one thing they would have us sit there and troubleshoot every call to its fullest. I would get calls expecting us to act like Dell, as in mention a bad part and expect it to shipped right away. Oh no, we have to ask questions and troubleshoot even corporate customers. As opposed to Dell and their "gold membership" 800 number.
Before Apple I had job where I had to call Dell regularly. Their Gold 800 number was extremely good: the [American] tech support would simply ask a couple questions and the part was on the way out, arriving often within 24 hours.
Apple has nothing like that. I assume because they do not have contracts with larger suppliers keeping extremely large stocks of all their spare parts. Now that Apple is more PC-like with x86 and all this could be changing (again, I doubt it).
Not that I'm an expert or anything but I was starting to assume companies care more about the service contract for phone support and hardware replacement than the brands. Since Dell can provide phone and hardware support and that all works alongside the server end of it that's what the companies go with. They don't really care about the brand (Dell this week, HP next week, GateWay or Toshiba or whatever the next) only the support contracts that make the most sense financially. Until Apple can put that kind of support structure in place I don't think they'll make large inroads in the corporate world.
Also, not booting Ghost or DriveImage...what hell is that? Those seem to be the deployment methods of choice for so many companies...
Re:Great for Entrepeneurs (Score:1, Informative)