[Macworld]

Post your comments for Why 'no Macs' is no longer a defensible IT strategy here

[leicaman]

Okay, the author doesn't get some things right here. One is Sharepoints. It's true that Macs can access Sharepoints for the most part. But not for Microsoft Plan (or whatever it's called.) That part of Sharepoints was specifically made Windows-only. Curiously, until recently, Microsoft had a Mac version of Plan.
There's a typo (I think) on the VBScript point. Apple had nothing to do with dropping it because of a two-year wait. That was Microsoft. Interesting, though, that MS is considering adding again later. Last I heard they were dropping it on the PC side. Guess I got some bad information on that point.
As for Active Directory support, it's there theoretically. But some bug prevents it from working in 10.5.2 (and earlier) if there's more than one name server (or whatever it's called) on an AD network.

[montgomery_burns]

A bunch of people tried to explain away the lack of VB in Office 2008 by claiming that VB in Office for Windows was also going away. But then this article came out:

http://www.betanews.com/article/NextMicrosoftOfficewillcontinuetosupport_VBA/1201120613

"While it's true that VBA isn't supported in the latest version of Office for the Mac...we have no plans to remove VBA from future versions of Office for Windows. We understand that VBA is a critical capability for large numbers of our customers; accordingly, there is no plan to remove VBA from future versions of Excel."

[scfischer]

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[scfischer]

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[scfischer]

InfoWorld said:

And thanks to the Mac?s move to standard PC components, such as... 802.11 wireless capabilities, such compatibility uses are falling by the wayside.

Pardon me, but wasn't 802.11 originally a standard Mac component that the PC platform adopted?

[scfischer]

The article also mentions ethernet ports as a standard PC component. As I recall, the first computers to have ethernet ports come standard were Macs. I remember when cable internet first became popular, all of my PC friends had to buy ethernet cards for their computers to be able to use it. My beige G3 had one from the beginning.

[NeilW]

SaaS vendors have to target all browsers and operating systems. In our case (expense reports, timesheets, customer service / help desk) we do most of our development in OS X testing against Firefox and Safari and a final QA against IE6/7 (Parallels is such a good thing), so it's a natural for us to support Macs.
...Neil (www.nexonia.com)

[diamondgeeza]

The "macs play nice on windows networks" isn't totally true. try windows 2003 server, we had t buy admit mc, the cost of the os alone just to use the shares. then they briefly worked with leopard and are now toast again. i give up.
IT are a pain though, our network was "apple free" and they wanted to keep it that way. so i just plugged in and it took them months to realise. lame...

[NaOH]

The author of this piece doesn't seem to have proofread it properly.
In the quote below, Apple are blamed for the lack of VBscript in Office 2008.
"The reason, says Amanda Lefebvre, senior marketing manager of the Mac business unit at Microsoft, is that it would have taken two years to port the VBscript engine from the PowerPC code base (PowerPC was the IBM CPU family Apple had used for about a decade before switching to Intel two years ago) to the Intel code base. So Apple dropped this key feature to minimize the delay between the two releases."

[mdawson]

Obviously, Galen Gruman knows little to nothing about Macs as his article is riddled with inaccuracies and errors.
> {quote:title= Galen Gruman (InfoWorld) wrote:}{quote}
>
> Because Microsoft never released a version of IE for Mac OS X, Mac users were frozen out of ActiveX-based Web sites, making many SaaS (software as a service) offerings and enterprise-app Web clients off limits to the Mac.
Wrong. Microsoft supported Internet Explorer on the Mac since the introduction of the browser, but intentionally left out the ability to support various proprietary Microsoft Web technologies. Then, as they have done with a number of the few MS apps developed for the Mac, Microsoft dropped IE support altogether in January 2006.
> {quote:title= Galen Gruman (InfoWorld) wrote:}{quote}
>
> The rise of virutalization, as well as Apple’s shift toward standardized PC components, has also helped pave the way for Mac use in business.
Um, Apple has been using standardized PC components for at least 10 years. Apple pretty much dropped their proprietary interfaces about the time of the iMac’s introduction replacing ADB and GeoPort serial interfaces with USB and external SCSI ports with FireWire. Apple also standardized on EIDE/ATA over SCSI for internal drives around the same time. With the exception of ADC, Apple had pretty much abandoned the full-sized DB-15 connector for displays in favor of the VGA sub-D and even ADC-enabled Macs typically also had a VGA port available for attaching the analog displays that still dominated the market prior to the mid-2000s. For internal expansion, PCI had supplanted NuBus by 1997.
> {quote:title= Galen Gruman (InfoWorld) wrote:}{quote}
>
> First Parallels Desktop, then EMC’s VMware Fusion, enabled Apple’s Intel-based Macs to run honest-to-goodness Windows, not just in a separate boot volume (Apple offered that capability a couple years ago with its free BootCamp utility) but within the Mac OS environment.
Parallels Desktop was introduced before Apple released the Boot Camp beta and was perhaps the driving force behind Apple’s decision to develop Boot Camp.
> {quote:title= Galen Gruman (InfoWorld) wrote:}{quote}
>
> And thanks to the Mac’s move to standard PC components, such as Intel processors, USB ports, Ethernet ports, and 802.11 wireless capabilities, such compatibility uses are falling by the wayside. As late as the mid-1990s, Macs included a series of proprietary connections, such as LocalTalk and ADB, and tapped SCSI drive interface technology found only on high-performance PCs.
The processor should not have been an issue as far as IT is concerned. If that were the case, those that needed high-end workstations would have never been provided with systems from Sun or SGI before those markets were infiltrated by the core PC OEMs. As scfischer suggested, Apple was one of the first PC OEMs to adopt IEEE 802.11 for wireless connectivity.
As scfischer mentioned, Apple standardized on Ethernet long before the PC OEMs, correction: ATX motherboard manufacturers, did so. Ethernet has been a standard feature in Macs since the early 1990s and was even included by default in consumer grade Macs by the late-1990s when most Wintel PCs still only offered Ethernet as a PCI-based add-on. Ethernet was not a standard feature on most of the motherboards purchased by the Wintel PC OEMs until 2000/2001. Apple has also been very good at standardizing on new Ethernet protocols before the rest of the PC industry. Macs had Ethernet, Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet well before most Wintel PCs offered the feature.
While Apple was not the first PC OEM to adopt USB, they were pretty much behind the USB explosion. USB was unknown to most computer users and sparsely used before the introduction of the iMac. Apple’s all-in-one consumer-grade wonder pushed the peripheral OEMs to go from not supporting USB to making it the standard interface on consumer grade peripherals within a year. So to state that not having USB was a factor in IT not supporting Macs is completely false, as USB support was effectively non-existent until Apple doggedly pushed for USB support for the iMac.
Lastly, SCSI was hardly proprietary. By the mid-1990s Apple had standardized on SCSI for internal drives whereas the bulk of Wintel PCs used IDE. Higher-end Wintel PCs also used SCSI for faster data transfer rates; such systems were simply in the minority, but they did exist for power users and Wintel servers.
> {quote:title= Galen Gruman (InfoWorld) wrote:}{quote}
>
> Most of these hardware issues have been rectified, leaving just a few special keyboard keys to map between Windows and Mac OS when developing cross-platform apps.
Does he mean using ‘command’ instead of ‘ctrl’ or ‘option’ instead of ‘alt’? The real keyboard differences between Windows and OS X are more operating system differences than keyboard differences. For instance, the Mac OS has always supported ‘command’ ‘left arrow’ and ‘command’ ‘right arrow’ in place of ‘home’ and ‘end’ for cursor navigation even once ‘home’ and ‘end’ keys were introduced to Mac keyboards around the time of the PowerPC transition.
> {quote:title= Galen Gruman (InfoWorld) wrote:}{quote}
>
> What Mac Office 2008 lacks, however, is support for Microsoft’s VBscript, on which most serious Excel financial spreadsheets depend. Mac users can see the spreadsheets’ data, but not work with them. The reason, says Amanda Lefebvre, senior marketing manager of the Mac business unit at Microsoft, is that it would have taken two years to port the VBscript engine from the PowerPC code base (PowerPC was the IBM CPU family Apple had used for about a decade before switching to Intel two years ago) to the Intel code base. So Apple dropped this key feature to minimize the delay between the two releases.
Firstly, it is VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) and not VBscript. Second, Apple did not drop anything, Microsoft did. When it came to the attention of Mac users in mid-2007 that Office 2008 would not support VBA, Microsoft representatives flat out lied. Microsoft reps stated that continued VBA support in Office 2007 was solely the result of outcry from Office for Windows users, and that the next version of Office for Windows would not support VBA. It has since been discovered, as montgomery_burns linked, that Microsoft has no intention of removing VBA support from Office for Windows.
The MBU has had plenty of time to migrate Office:mac to Xcode since OS X was introduced inn 2001, let alone migrate to a Universal Binary code base. Microsoft also has the resources to do whatever is necessary to give the MBU the means to not only keep Office:mac in complete feature parity with the Windows version, but also to provide the full complement of the Microsoft application library to the Mac community. Microsoft has intentionally chosen not to do so and has in fact decreased the number of Microsoft products developed for the Mac in the 10+ years since the MBU was created.

[diamondgeeza]

wow dawson certainly knows what he/she is atlking about...

i agree, apple is hardly using non proprietary stuff these days (last i can think of was the ADC which could have gone mainstream :( ). I actually think that it has been Apple that have pushed major technologies such as USC, SCSI, wifi, ethernet etc.

I can't tell the amount of abuse my mates would give me about that obscure USB connection, or what the hell am i going to do with an ehternet port anyway?

[montgomery_burns]

Apple fans see the ability to run Windows on Mac as some magic potion that will cause IT departments everywhere to start dumping their PCs and begin mass migrations to Macs. "Best of both worlds". "Run everything on a Mac". However, this rosy view of the future must be taken with a dose of reality because the outcome could easily go either way.

For many years, people who use Macs in Windows dominated environments have had to deal with poor Mac support. After being denied proper support for so long, a lot of these Mac users will see the ability to run Windows on Macs as the solution to all their problems. So these Mac users will happily install Windows on their Macs, not being aware of the long term consequences. They say that they will only use it for just 1 Windows application and do everything else in Mac OS. But what starts out as 1 application turns into a long list. First Internet Explorer. Then Outlook. Then Microsoft Access. And since they are running Outlook and Access, why not run the rest of Microsoft Office in Windows? Having issues connecting to Windows 2003 servers? Just do it from Windows. Tired of calling the IT department for Mac support issues? Just run Windows.

And IT departments are only too eager to help Mac users put Windows on their Macs. They smile through their teeth and publicly say all sorts of wonderful things about the Mac such as "The Apple hardware looks so nice" or "My kid has an iPod". It all looks nice on the surface, but those IT departments have a hidden agenda. First, they no longer have to bother learning about Macs in any way. And even though they don't know anything about Macs, they still get to claim that they know Macs and support Macs. Finally, they see Windows on Macs as a way to wean Mac users off the Mac OS. By "supporting" Mac users to do everything in Windows, this will make it easier for them to replace Macs with "lower cost", "standard" PCs in the future.

Mac users need to decide what is more important to them: Simply having something with an Apple logo on their desk, or being able to run Mac OS and Mac applications. The more accepting Mac users are of running Windows on Macs, the more excuse IT departments will have for providing poor Mac OS support. Because to clueless managers and IT drones, the Mac is just a glorified PC that should be running Windows anyway. And since Macs can run Windows, who needs Mac OS?

[MacosNerd]

I work in an IT division that actually has a mixed platform of PCs and some Macs. I can safely say that while I love and use Macs all of the time. Having macs on the network causes an increase in service tickets being logged. Mainly due to incompatibilities, such as safari, office etc. Then there's issues in publishing updates to these computers. While the macs require less security updates, my company publishes other items and the application that is used has issues with pushing the stuff to Macs. Sharepoint has also been noted in another post, so I'll not belabor that point.

Lack of VBA is probably one of the largest issues, since a spreadsheet that is created on pc may have some to solve a specific solution but if its being sent to a mac, then problems arise.