Are Macs Invading the Enterprise?
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"Better watch out, better not cry Macs are gonna make your IT guy sigh..."
Set to, "Santa Claus is coming to town"
Usually I ignore the daily LinkedIn updates in my inbox informing me of the goings on of people who may know people that were once in the same state as a guy I sat next to in Burger King 1o years ago. Wow, that whole 6 degrees of separation thing must be true...
So one of those strangers in my inbox was recommending a link to a story on Business Insider talking about the increase of Macs in the workplace. The cliff notes version goes something like; Rich professional people are really creative and like Macs more than PC's and because of it they want to use them at work.
I've actually seen evidence of this in action at my last employer.
The entire organization was run on PC platforms but there were a few Macs floating around as well as some Mac "servers" Which were glorified 1U server chassis' running Snow Leopard. AKA, not a server.
True to the assertion of the article, our Mac users were in the executive suites and generally didn't want to do more than get their email and browse the web. Anything else required running terminal server sessions a la' Parallels just to edit a word document.
I remember on my first day I got called to the office of the regional manager whose only complaint was that the terminal server session and desktop wasn't like his Mac desktop. Great first impression I made that day.
By the time I came along the Mac users already accepted the fact that we could never be a pure Mac shop mostly because everyone else had to do lots of boring uncreative stuff that didn't work on Macs.
I've written other articles about Macs in business environment so I won't belabor the point here. Suffice it to say that as long as Apple treats all their products as consumer devices (even if it says "pro" on it) with no regard for business process, there will always be resistance by IT departments. In this case, resistance is not futile because the bottom line is that Macs don't play well with most enterprise networks and applications.
Continued on the next page
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