I think you’re missing the full significance of Taylor’s point. I.T. isn’t simply an infrastructure function like building maintenance or janitorial services. What’s expected from an I.T. department isn’t necessarily fixed. Instead, what’s generally fixed (or roughly fixed) for an I.T. department is the size of its staff. So if an I.T. department can do some part of its job more efficiently that means not that the department will shrink, but that the department will be able to do more.

This is not to say that I.T. departments are immune to laziness, inertia, incompetence, or ulterior motives, but those are risks of every department in every company. The assessment of new I.T. technologies is best left to the I.T. department. Management should certainly critically examine the I.T. department’s suggestions and make their own decision, but there’s nowhere else they can go for better informed advice. If they basically can’t trust the I.T. department (as you suggest in your car mechanic analogy), then they have far bigger problems than whether or not they should be using PCs or Macs.

…and as to why I.T. departments use PCs rather than Macs if PCs are clearly better…

I used to use Linux on PCs. Since OS X came out, I’ve switched to Macs, as has my wife and anyone else who asked for my advice on a computer purchase. I think any consumer getting a computer (except perhaps gamers) is insane to get anything other than a Mac.

Several other people in the I.T. department in which I work feel the same way, and they’d love to use Macs at work as well. (In fact, until about 8 or so years ago, the company used Macs almost exclusively–it’s a media company.) Several of them have approached the Vice Presidents in charge of I.T. saying that we’d be better off if we switched back to Macs. One of the Vice Presidents told me that if one more person approached her with such a proposal, she wouldn’t be held responsible for her reaction. Apple has made it clear that they’re not after the corporate market and they mean it. The implications of that declaration may not be clear to people who aren’t I.T. professionals, but they’re clear to those of us who are.

As I said, my company used to be Mac-based. We write many custom applications for our business, and we expect them to live 10, 15, or more years, many of which run in what is now called the Mac classic environment. About eight years ago (in the pre-OS X days), it became clear that Apple wasn’t going to be able to keep up with our needs. We began moving toward what became the J2EE platform. Not only did pre-OS X Mac operating systems not run Java very well (OS 9 never could run anything more recent than Java 1.1), but they didn’t offer a viable enterprise platform alternative. So we began migrating to PCs, generally running Windows (though they cold as easily run Linux for our custom application purposes).

These days, we can run most of our J2EE applications just fine on OS X, and a few users do. But what has my Vice President so upset is that we still have all of those applications running in Classic (and will for years), but Apple no longer sells computers that will run Classic. We now have to go back and re-write applications that are working just fine. Similarly, my wife is an editor at a large publishing company that is essentially built around Adobe’s Creative Suite. Apple only sells Intel-based computers, on which Creative Suite will only run using Rosetta. They’re less than pleased.

In making these transitions (from OS 9 to OS X and from PowerPC to Intel), Apple has made it clear that they expect everyone depending on them to make the transition in a couple of years. That’s many years short of a realistic time frame. Companies don’t want to have to re-write their custom applications that often (see: fixed I.T. department size, previous comment). I think Apple knows that, and that’s why they’ve declared that they’re not pursuing the corporate market. Innovation is great fun in the consumer market, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that it isn’t an end in itself. Companies need stability and predictability in their infrastructure, and Apple isn’t interested in or good at providing that. Microsoft’s not so great at it either (though IBM is), but they’re much better than Apple.

Morgan:

First off, congrats, you posted the 5000th comment! Not that there’s a door prize, but still, FYI.

About trusting the IT Dept.: I would probably stand by the statement about trusting the IT dept.’s recommendations. If the company decision-makers implicitly trust the IT Dept., then OK; but if there were a possible change that could end in the diminishment of any department, could that department really be trusted to judge on it, with departments tending to be so jealously protective of their budgets? Even if you don’t ascribe greed or laziness, how about a manager genuinely caring about whether or not he lays off staff? If companies left decisions to downsize departments to the departments themselves, would they really ever downsize?

I would think (as a non-professional who knows very little) that decisions like this would best be left to experts, but only those without a dog in the race–hire an outside consultant to study the problem.

As for custom software: point taken. Question, though: how many organizations have such large numbers of complex, custom-built applications that rewriting them every 10 years would outweigh the benefits of having Macs?

Not to mention that Macs now run Windows as well, and would run your new apps just fine. Might want to tell your VP that.

This is not meant as any sort of attempt to deride you or take a shot at you, Luis, but sometimes your comments really reflect that you haven’t worked in any sort of corporate environment.

Even small companies and businesses often have proprietary software which they have been running for a decade or more which require them to be very careful about changing equipment. While, in theory, they should all run in Windows on a Mac, buying Macs and then buying licenses for Windows on each Mac is not only an added expense but also a time waster. It also requires all employees to be comfortable in two OS environments and that all equipment be replaced “at once” in order for all machines to be compatible. Macs won’t talk to all flavors of Windows and old machines can’t run XP.

For most businesses, this is just too much money at once. Most replace machines as needed. My old office was a mix of Windows machines going from Win ’95 to Win XP. Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t run Macs because the database, which they weren’t about to update for a Mac because they wouldn’t waste tha much money. The database wouldn’t even run with full functionality on any version of Windows except ’95. It ran with limited functionality of all other versions. I guess, in theory, they could install 3 versions of Windows on an Intel Mac but that’s getting pretty hairy.

The same is the case for my sister’s library. They use software which will never be written for the Mac. What’s their incentive to switch? My sister, who is the research librarian, is the IT department and she doens’t know Macs. For them, the cost of switching is far greater than the price of the machines. I think that can be said for a lot of companies.

This isn’t even getting into hardware issues. A lot of hardware, especially things like barcode scanners, wont’ run on a Mac. In both my sister’s work experience and mine, barcode scanners were used but there is also the question of old but fully-functioning printers, scanners, etc. which need not be replaced except for the fact that using Macs would require it. Even for me, personally, my Mini won’t run my USB scanner because the only driver I have for it is an OS 9 one (but the PC does work with it).

With my recent hassles because of a virus, I can see why you’d think IT departments might save money with Macs but the truth is they suffer less of it than most home users because they can block sites selectively and usually run commercial scanners all the time on all machines.

While I may agree that, far down the road, there’s a chance that a company may be better off in a Mac-based environment but there are a lot of bumps on that road, not the least of which being a point Morgan raised about Apple’s tendency to move ahead and abandon their old technology.

Wow, I’m honored. That’s a helluva lotta of comments. Congratulations.

I’m guessing you haven’t actually worked in a corporate environment. To start, if you have somebody working for you that you don’t trust (implicitly or otherwise), you’re too incompetent to choose software or do much managing of any kind. You have an I.T. department to do these things for you. If you can’t manage your experts (I.T. or otherwise), your company will fail. And the I.T. department does have a “dog in the race”–the company itself. Any cushy job that someone in I.T. would be trying to protect by making questionable technology decisions won’t be very valuable once the company’s gone out of business. That’s basic management.

And hiring outside consultants in that siutation, though commonly done, is foolish (speaking as a former consultant myself). If you know enough to ask the right questions and elicit the correct answers from a consultant, then you also have the ability to do so with your own I.T. department. If you can’t do that with your I.T. department, trying to do it with consultants won’t go any differently. Consultants tend not to do assessments only–they, like I.T. departments, also want to implement solutions. They’re at least as suseptible to bias, perahps more so, given that they don’t have to live with the implications of their decisions.

I think, rather than assuming that corporations across the board are incompetent for sticking to PCs in the face of the evidence you’ve seen, you might consider why corporations have so consistently made this same decision. (And by the way, note that the consulting companies happen not to recommending that corporations switch to Macs either.) Perhaps they have information that you don’t. The custom software is certainly an important example of that. Any company with an I.T. department large enough to be relevant to this conversation will have enough custom software to make switching platforms prohibitive. I think that’s far more common than you’re assuming, and it’s a big deal.

We have, for instance, a facilities management system that was written about a decade ago. It manages the scheduling of editors, editing facilities, studios, materials, etc. This application works just fine, and is in no need of updating or enhancement, and isn’t likely to be for maybe another decade. But since it was written to run on OS 9 (or System 7 or 8 at the time), it has to be rewritten just because we can’t buy computers to run it on anymore. That’s an enormous waste. And we have enough software that is in real need of enhancement–along with all of the new software that we need to write–to support our rapidly evolving business. We don’t really have the resouces to spend on fixing something that’s working fine because Apple made a series of bad processor and operating system decisions.

I don’t want to convince my Vice President to buy Macs to run Windows using unsupported beta tools. In fact, I’m not really interested in getting her to buy Macs at all. Apple has cost us millions of dollars, and caused me and my colleagues significant managerial headaches. They aren’t interested in the corporate market, and I’m not interested in trying to coax their offerings into working in a context for which they’re not intended.

But by all means, buy Macs for personal use. They’re so much better than PCs in almost every respect in that context that it’s not funny. But that doesn’t translate to superiority in the corporate market, much as you might want it to.

Well, obviously I don’t know enough about the environment even to debate the matter, so I’ll defer to the better knowledge you both have on the issue.

Sorry if I sound snotty and impatient. I don’t mean to (though I often end up doing so).

And don’t worry–things are going just the way you want. As a happy Apple consumer user, you don’t want Apple pursuing the corporate market. If Apple had a significant corporate customer base that they cared about, they wouldn’t have made the transitions from OS 9 to OS X and from PowerPC to Intel the way they did, and that would have been bad for consumer users.

The corporate and consumer markets are different enough that they can’t be satisfied by a single product or set of products. The results of Microsoft’s attempts to do both is all the evidence you need. Where they need to shed Windows (the way that Apple shed OS 9) to compete effectively against Apple in the consumer market, they can’t. Yet their unwillingness to surrender the consumer market means they still have to try to do things with Windows that make it too unstable and unpredictable for corporate users, where they’ll eventually be destroyed by a combination of IBM, Sun, Oracle, Java, Linux, and other companies and technologies. THey’ll be left in a position where they’re not good enough at either to fall back on their strength when things get bad. You don’t want that happening to Apple.

Morgan: not at all–in fact, I should be saying that. I spouted out on a topic I don’t know anything about, and was rightly slapped down. I hope I don’t do that too often…