David Pogue, always the rabble rouser posted this article about Apple in the corporate environment.
As a Mac tech at a newspaper with 4000 PCs and 500 Macs, I think I am as well placed as anyone to comment on this so I started to jot some musings and it turned into the text below. I didn’t want it to get truncated on Mr Pogues site so I have continued it here.
I am a great Mac advocate but even I can see that the priority Apple put on their development is to make Mac OS X the best consumer OS they can at the expense of all else.
Despite all the normal bigotry and blinkered vision, I think the biggest problem facing us as Mac integrators is that OS X just is not suited to big installations, it seems to have been designed to fit in in minority.
Where Windows, through necessity, has grown to scale with server clustering, remote management (don’t get me started on ARD and OD), auditing etc. Apple choose to make sure the cases look nice and the dock does that pretty zoom thing.
We once had the head of Apple UK come to our office and I told him that in my opinion the reason Apple will never gain huge market share is that they are concentrating on the home. If I was a “normal” user, I sure wouldn’t want to use a PC at home when I have already learnt how to use my PC at work. Why learn another system that isn’t compatible? People buy wintel PCs for home because that’s what they know. They know wintel PCs because they use them at work.
More corporate Macs would mean more hearts and minds and more market share.
Apple don’t seem to listen to their corporate users very much but if they did I would suggest:
1) Face the fact that its all about the software and always has been. Any schmo can make a PC these days. No-one else has Mac OS X.
Licence the OS to all and sundry. They will bite Apple’s arms off to use Mac OS X on their machines, especially if the OEM licences are better than Redmond’s.
Its a no effort move, it just takes commitment. Invent some kind of OSX certified specification stamp, OS X already runs on most generic PC hardware you just have to state what stuff it runs on.
There’s a guy at work that swears the his Dell laptop is the best Mac he has ever had.
If you feel you need to stay in the hardware market, becuase of the extra value you provide, fine but don’t be supprised and hurt when the OEMs under cut you like last time.
Set your licence price at such that it will be economically viable for them to use your software but covers your profit on lost hardware sales.
2) Make OS X more dependable (see earlier post re. copying). It’s getting better. User beta testing will help here.
3) Make a new Pro version of iWork that is better than Office 2004 for all the stuff we normally do, making it compatible, easier and shareable. Sell it for less than Microsoft Office and make the licensing simple. I know it will cannibalise Microsoft’s market for Office, but business is war after all and all’s fair… Give MS some competition for the first time.
Competition is healthy, it makes everyone try harder.
4) Face up to the simple fact that people like us use file servers, lots of them. Apple doesn’t seem to get this at the moment. There is no coherent way of managing server connections in Mac OS X and it sucks badly.
5) Make OS X Server SCALE and provide redundancy. Improve clustering for file and mail services and sort out Print serving. Try to remember that not everyone uses OS X server to host web sites, not everyone streams video, but everyone uses files.
6) If Apple insist on remaining a hardware company, add a corporate column to the product matrix. Please make some really cheap plain $300 boxes that are “good enough” and are expandable with a couple of normal PCI slots and loads of USB, use cheaper plastic cased screens, have lots of RAM and small hard drives. We don’t care about gigabit, FireWire 800, optical audio, DVD-RW DL, and all the other lovely stuff that pushes up prices. It will sit under the desk or under the screen and run email, Web, WP and maybe VMWare/Citrix/MSRDC.
The Mini is still too expensive and its too small. I showed it to my IT director and he said that we couldn’t have them because people would walk out of the building with them in their bags and coats. Who wants to add $150 to the cost for a security bracket?
7) Make servers that look like crap (no one sees them anyway) are bigger than 1U with lots of drive bays, slots and redundancy (Yes I know the PSUs are redundant on the new XServes.)
Include 3 yrs. onsite in the corporate price (or at least provide it as an option for under $100) and support server spares for longer than 3 years (jeez that’s so annoying)
Provide all your products with good tech documentation, especially the server – No, the software not easy enough to just use and even if it was it wouldn’t matter, we love documentation. No the pamphlets you provide are not good enough.
We need good, in-depth, nuts and bolts, plist and unix file documentation.
Look at Microsoft and Sun’s documentation and make yours as good or better. If IT people can’t get inside, they won’t trust it and if they don’t trust it they will not recommend it.
Its not the managers that spec the systems, its us techies. They just sign the paperwork.
9) Set up a Mac IT Pro site like the developer site with registration and give information to those who need it. We look after more Macs than most Authorised service centres, we need that info. Why do you think there are so many web-sites like MacEnterprise and AFP548, nature abhors a vacuum. Create a pro forum to share views and information.
Finally
10) You should be getting involved in how we work and think and listening to us – your customers.
Set-up the CSQ programme again and involve corporate clients with beta testing.
Using “developers” to beta test software is too passive and restricted. Providing beta’s to developers is tantamount to saying, this is what you are getting, make sure your software works with it. It is too dictatorial. The software needs to be used and integrated into a real environment. This is why we are just getting a stable (ish) 10.4.7.
The average developer doesn’t have the heterogeneous back end we have to deal with or test against. We are an asset, use us.