Why OS X Doesn’t Provide An Advantage In Enterprise
David Jericho revisits his complaints about the airport express and ends with the comment:
To that end, try as I might, from borrowing and using my sisters 1.2GHz iBook for a month, to using Kirsten’s G4 machines at home exclusively I remain unconvinced. I fail to see a use for the hardware (and the price tag - although the laptops have come down), and I just can’t see what benefits the software offers anyone in an enterprise.
Of course, as always, I’m willing to be reeducated and ask those who can tell me why it is ready for the enterprise, or why exactly OS X is better than an appropriately setup Windows XP system to come forward and brain me.
Apple have never really targeted the enterprise. The main reason you don’t see a big advantage to OS X in the enterprise is because there’s not a lot that makes a difference to enterprise desktops. There are a lot of management tools and servers that make a big difference to administration costs, but reducing user frustration isn’t particularly important since you have professional system administrators taking care of that side of things. Also, more and more enterprise software is becoming web-based so the actual OS doesn’t matter much for them.
The real benefits of OS X come through when you give it to your grandmother who’s never used a computer before - there tends to be far less maintenance and hassles with OS X than with Windows and a far simpler learning curve than with Linux. In the enterprise though you just won’t notice much of that - particularly if you’re trying to integrate with an existing Windows network because you get all the hassles of a Windows network as well as the hassles of cross-platform compatibility. Perhaps you’d find advantages to OS X in the enterprise if you built the entire infrastructure around OS X but it’s hard to say since I don’t know of any significant instances of doing that. I suspect you’d probably find that Apple’s management tools and server offerings are a little immature anyway.
The other thing you’ll find is that using any new OS for a month doesn’t really give you an appreciation for what’s good about it if your skills are so highly developed in a different OS. For instance, I have three machines on my desk at home, one Windows, one Linux and one OS X but I almost exclusively use the OS X box because a) it’s the laptop I carry around with me everywhere but b) that’s where my skillset is most highly developed (and I know about all the applications to install that make life so much more pleasant).
I suppose the big question though is, what requirements do you have that aren’t being met by your current Windows XP setup? If there aren’t any major requirements being unfulfilled then there’s no possible way that any other setup could impress you.
December 29th, 2004 at 2:46 am
Disagree … the key advantage for OS X in the enterprise is the same advantage that it allows for your Grandma … ease of use. That ease of use can translate into dramatic savings in the enterprise, if say, you can trim 5 minutes a day from each persons job.
Roughly speaking, that translates to a 1% productivity improvement, or an additional one person in productivity for every 100 in your organization. So, take the average salary paid to all your organizations knowledge workers and multiple by 0.01 for an idea of the savings.
Oh, and where might those 5 minutes come from? To get an idea, here is just one unbiased place to start: http://www.consumerreports.org/main/detailv3.jsp?CONTENT%3C%3Ecnt_id%20=305449
December 31st, 2004 at 3:48 am
Downtime. I’m a year long OSX from Windows convert and the amount of time I spend managing the OS is near zero. The only time I’ve had to reboot is when upgrading the system. Enterprises that have tight control over the desktop may not have to contend with malware and viruses as much as others but it’s still and issue. SMEs don’t necessarily have that kind of control and you end up with users that flood there system with all kinds of crap. That translates into more downtime for the employee and higher maintenance costs. The higher cost of the hardware is offset by this and more.