Macs Are a Major Business Platform

[Toe]

Tiger is still buggy as hell. The only difference between Tiger's final release and Microsoft's public beta system (which they've done for XP, win2003, winXP 64, MSN Messenger 7, WDS, SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and will do for Longhorn Server (Aug 3rd) and Vista Beta 2, RC0, RC1, and RC2) is that one is sold to you for a price and the other is downloadable for free.

I agree that Tiger still contains glitches and bugs, but I would hardly characterize 10.4 as a paid public beta. I deployed 10.4.0 client and server in a live business environment with no real problems. 10.4.2 is serving us very well, and we are in the process of migrating the remainder of our 10.3.9 machines to it.

10.0 was a for-sale public beta for crazy early adopters. 10.4.x is a very good, very mature computing platform. It would be silly to imagine that any release version of Windows is not going to be rife with bugs (since every update says they fixed tens of thousands of bugs). I'd say Tiger is still ahead by a good margin.

 

[BGil]

1.- Of course; its a Mac site, remember? Though i never took part of any discussion of it as I had no facts to support my impressions of it by then, it is hardly an issue to talk about it over here before it was released. besides, it was mainly talking about new features in relation to Panther, not a comparison on how we are better than XP because our operating system that is going to be released a year or so from now has this or that feature. On the other side, we are still more than a year off of Microsoft's claimed release date of Longhorn. Can you see the difference?


2.- Whatever; it still wont be available to general public (unless you are a geek) until late 2006 at best. So, as I said before, let's compare Tiger to XP and Leopard to Longhorn, after they get released and we actually now some facts about both of them.

1. There was much talk about how Spotlight was better than XP's search and Longhorn's. There was a ton of talk about Photoshop being better on OS X because of CoreImage. Jobs himself even discussed Spotlight versus Microsoft's Desktop Search. MSDS was shipping at the time and Spotlight was not BTW. The pure speculation around here was enourmous.

2. How is freely downloadable from Microsoft.com and not under NDA == "wont be available to the general public"? Anyone in the general public can donwload it and run it on their system for free.
I'll be glad to compare XP to Tiger, or Leopard to whatever but that could all become irrelevant for us geeks and enthusiasts (I assume that's why your here) next Wednesday. Vista will be stripped of it's NDA for the first time, and we'll be able to legally run it on our systems and discuss it freely. All the facts will be in the Vista/Longhorn iso.

Hell, Vista/Longhorn will be just as "publically available" as Gmail or 90% of the OSS I come in contact with.

 

[BGil]

I agree that Tiger still contains glitches and bugs, but I would hardly characterize 10.4 as a paid public beta. I deployed 10.4.0 client and server in a live business environment with no real problems. 10.4.2 is serving us very well, and we are in the process of migrating the remainder of our 10.3.9 machines to it.

10.0 was a for-sale public beta for crazy early adopters. 10.4.x is a very good, very mature computing platform. It would be silly to imagine that any release version of Windows is not going to be rife with bugs (since every update says they fixed tens of thousands of bugs). I'd say Tiger is still ahead by a good margin.

Have you seen the Windows Server 2003 or Windows 64-bit betas and releases? Windows Server 2003 was by far the best release of a major OS (Mac or Windows) that I've ever seen. Even the betas of Windows Server 2003 were publically deployable.

And what "update says they fixed tens of thousands of bugs"?

I guess we'll know for sure on Wednesday, huh?

 

[Toe]

And what "update says they fixed tens of thousands of bugs"?

From Win 95 until around ME, every time MS updated Windows or Office, they would say that they were fixing thousands or tens of thousands of bugs.
http://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+"thousands+of+bugs"

I guess they finally toned it down a little. After all, what they were expressly saying was that they had sold you software with tens of thousands of bugs in it, took years to address them, and now want you to pay for a fix (it was often the full version upgrades that had these insulting statements associated with them). Heck... now when they update one of those, they only list a few hundred bugs they're addressing... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811113/. Guess the public beta didn't work that time?

But I'm sure Vista, after a one-year public beta, will be completely bug free.


P.S. I also found it funny while looking for the above link that their top-ten list for why to upgrade to Windows XP is mostly about solving problems with using Windows:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/evaluation/whyupgrade/top10.mspx

Compare that to the "New in Tiger" page, that's mostly about major new features to help you with things other than using your computer:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/newfeatures/
http://www.apple.com/macosx/newfeatures/over200.html

 

[BGil]

From Win 95 until around ME, every time MS updated Windows or Office, they would say that they were fixing thousands or tens of thousands of bugs.
http://www.google.com/search?q=micr...ands+of+bugs"

I guess they finally toned it down a little. After all, what they were expressly saying was that they had sold you software with tens of thousands of bugs in it, took years to address them, and now want you to pay for a fix (it was often the full version upgrades that had these insulting statements associated with them). Heck... now when they update one of those, they only list a few hundred bugs they're addressing... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811113/. Guess the public beta didn't work that time?

Why are you talking about NT 4 and Windows 2000? That would be like bringing up FreeBSD 3 or OS 9 bugs.

I said Windows Server 2003 and XP 64 bit. I ask again, have you used either? That's the code base Longhorn is built on.

Compare that to the "New in Tiger" page, that's mostly about major new features to help you with things other than using your computer:

Now you're comparing Apple's advertising to Microsoft's advertising? Is that supposed to show that Tiger is less buggy than the OSes I mentioned? You act like virtually every 10.x.x. release doesn't introduce new bugs. Everytime I update our Macs I have to go through a checklist to see if our Pro apps still function correctly. Still waiting for them to FTFF.

But I'm sure Vista, after a one-year public beta, will be completely bug free.

No one ever said something about "completely bug free", nothing ever gets that denomination. All I ask is for a high-quality release, Tiger wasn't one win2k3 was, period.

 

[colocolo]

I am really tired because it's late BGil, so please work with me so i can be illuminated...

1. There was much talk about how Spotlight was better than XP's search and Longhorn's. There was a ton of talk about Photoshop being better on OS X because of CoreImage.

I find it possible that there was some talk about it. My point was, and still is, that most of the talking was not about that. I did a quick search at the forums looking for threads 6 months or older talking about tiger, windows and sptolight. Going through 25% of the messages of half the threads, i found no comparison that claimed how much better Tiger was than Longhorn.. in fact, most posts agree that we must "wait and see" what comes out in the final release, though conceding they were impressed by the demos. I would be very happy if you could find some posts for me to support those "tons of talks". I mean it, I like to be proven wrong

By the way, I am being very generous with the time frame I selected; it would be equivalent of searching for all the comments touting Longhorn features until April, 2006 at best. Meaning that by that time there was a lot more official information about Tiger than there can possibly be about Longhorn final release.

Jobs himself even discussed Spotlight versus Microsoft's Desktop Search. MSDS was shipping at the time and Spotlight was not BTW. The pure speculation around here was enourmous.

This has absolutely nothing to do. It's the same as using Gates' quotes to claim that you keep talking about what hasn't happenned.

2. How is freely downloadable from Microsoft.com and not under NDA == "wont be available to the general public"? Anyone in the general public can donwload it and run it on their system for free.
I'll be glad to compare XP to Tiger, or Leopard to whatever but that could all become irrelevant for us geeks and enthusiasts (I assume that's why your here) next Wednesday. Vista will be stripped of it's NDA for the first time, and we'll be able to legally run it on our systems and discuss it freely. All the facts will be in the Vista/Longhorn iso.

Hell, Vista/Longhorn will be just as "publically available" as Gmail or 90% of the OSS I come in contact with.

I have two things to say here:

i. By being available to the general public I meant to be on sale, or is Microsoft suddenly giving away all their goodies? And is the beta going to be supported by all manufacturers and developers? Is Microsoft going to issue an immediate software update if a nasty bug that corrupts your entire data shows up? If the answers to the above are no, then I'm guessing it's not something the average Joe will have installed on their computer, nor any corporation. I'll also guess that if you ask any Microsoft rep what your latest official operating system is he/she will say XP. A beta is not a final product. The final product is more than a year away.


ii. I need to ask you: haven't you learned NOTHING from Microsoft's history? Since Windows 95, I have been promised with every single release that their OS will blow everything else off the water, that they are the best thing since french toast ... yet they always seem to find a way to drop the ball. Forgive me for being, at least, skeptical about the final release. Need I say again it's more than a year away? Why are we even talking about such a product!

 

[JFreak]

Go to Apple-history.com and look at 1996. Those would be the computers that are just beginning to get phased out this year (assuming what you say is true). The original iMac (233 mhz no CDRW, no DVD, 4GB hard drive) would still be 2 years from being phased out. Obviously that's not true.

you are correct, that is not true. the original iMac still has several more years until being phased out, let's say 5 at least, maybe more. if only the hard drive doesn't fail, and even that can be easily replaced with a faster, bigger and less noisy one.

no, the original iMac is nowhere near being phased out. you're right.

 

[JFreak]

Of the 2 million users of Tiger already represent 16 percent of Apple’s entire Mac OS X user base. Forty-nine percent of Mac OS X users are running Panther, and 25 percent of Mac OS X users are still running Jaguar. The remainder are “laggards on early versions of Mac OS X,” according to Jobs.

If 2 million is 16% then that means there are 12.5 million Mac OS X users total. 17% of 200 million ( which is a very conservative estimate of the number of Windows business computers) is 34 million. Even if all of Apple's OS X user base are business users then where are they getting the other 22 million from?

that's pre-osx users and that number is mighty big. agreed, it is fair to compare osx to xp, but in bigger picture people are comparing windows to macintosh, and therefore pre-osx users must be count in. and pre-xp users, too, but that's almost impossible, as

1) most windows users upgrade from original os version to current, as long as the new os runs acceptably with the old hardware. sometimes that means unusably slow interface, but the windows user does not care because the new look is less bad than the old look. the upgrade license does not add to windows user base, but effectively removes old windows versions from use as great percentage of windows users want to use the latest version.

2) most businesses lease their computers for exactly three years, in which time microsoft counts windows licenses twice. that is, the OEM license that comes bundled with the pc hardware and then the additional corporate license that big businesses are buying mainly for not having to activate the os after every re-install.

so in other words, some percentage (at least 20, most likely more) of windows user base is totally bogus. on the other hand, there are tons of "undocumented" windows users, but that doesn't count anyway.

 

[BGil]

you are correct, that is not true. the original iMac still has several more years until being phased out, let's say 5 at least, maybe more. if only the hard drive doesn't fail, and even that can be easily replaced with a faster, bigger and less noisy one.

no, the original iMac is nowhere near being phased out. you're right.

That deserves no response.

 

[JFreak]

Why are you talking about NT 4?

maybe because (after 2003 server being best-ever windows), the NT4 still is the best-ever windows client version released. fast and stable, and only gripe about it was nonexistent multimedia features.

 

[ewinemiller]

Cool any IT professional can tell me there are a lot of Pentium 2&3s running at 350-500 MHz still in wide use in corporations.

I work for a very large company in the day job (~500k employees). We have tons of PII 450s and PIII 500s in use, which are about a 6 year old machines.

Not entirely, but for the most part in the local office, we don't use them for desktops anymore, just test and build machines. Our replacement cycle for desktops or laptops runs about 4 years. Up at corporate for our division I think they are still used widely in training classes.

The application I help build is web based so you really don't need anything faster, if it runs IE, it will run our app. One of the advantages for building web based vertical market apps is that corporations don't have to replace the desktops so often.

We just gave away all the PIIs in the 233-300mhz range to employees.

I can't provide any math to help prove the original article true or false, but from my experience I would say it's bull. I have yet to see a single Mac in a corporate environment outside of the one I had delivered to the office. The only platform change I see happening here is mixing more Linux into the pot and even that is 99% talk, very little action.