Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
My dentist, who also has an MBA and consults other practices on the business of dentistry, has used Macs since the beginning. It might just be the best run medical office I have ever been to also. Food for thought.
 
I guess someone forgot that Macs can run windows.

So yes it'll run on a Mac, not in OSX, but can run alongside of OSX with VMWare or Parallels. (or you can boot into windows on an Apple computer).

I hadn't forgotten, but getting a mac just to run Windows on it is slightly pointless, especially as far as work would be concerned.

SAP have a Java client called SAPGUI that runs natively on OS X. It lacks the Microsoft Office Integration that the windows client has, but other than that it is pretty much identical to the Windows version. Apple use SAP as their ERP system.

It is available from their FTP site ftp://ftp.sap.com/pub/sapgui/java/

Oh nice! I'll have to have a look into that. :)
 
I am here in Japan and fairly recently Aozora Bank, a nation-wide yet fairly small bank, switched completely to macs if I recall correctly. I am not sure of the specifics on it, but that is one where the entire company use macs i think.
 
Bootcamp, VMWare, and Parallels are great for us consumers, but people: I do not think a company would use them. It would be crazy to license two operating systems for every employee. And what's the added value of using a Mac when you run Windows on it? Because it looks pretty in the office?

No way a company would use Macs to run Windows.

A promising development is the rise of (rich) web applications. Those are cross platform, so you could easily use a Mac to run them. Web apps we run here are Maximo and HP Servicedesk.

The only thing the Mac needs is Access in their office suite. Excel worksheets and Access databases are widely used. Oh, with Visual Basic support for macro's or added functionality! :)

--Erwin
 
Bootcamp, VMWare, and Parallels are great for us consumers, but people: I do not think a company would use them.
We use Parallels on some of our machines. For web design and software testing it's useful to have multiple web browsers and multiple OS's.

OS X is more secure and easier to maintain. Having Windows in a Window makes sense because, at the end of the day, the installation contains no essential information and is disposable if problems occur. OS X is also far more stable - if Windows in a Window crashes then it matters not, CS3 continues to run happy-as-Larry in OS X as if nothing happened :)

I think a lot of companies that use OS X would use virtualisation software. It's a cheap, easy way of having a 'PC' available.
 
The only thing the Mac needs is Access in their office suite. Excel worksheets and Access databases are widely used. Oh, with Visual Basic support for macro's or added functionality! :)
I haven't done any work for a company that uses Access for about four years now. Pretty much every database in the medium to large businesses I have as clients was moved to either Oracle or SQL.

And for good reason. Access is utterly pants :p
 
I've got a friend who works at the hospital (NHS), they just changed his ward over to macs completely.
Other than that, graphics, video and audio companies are the standard mac user base!
 
I haven't done any work for a company that uses Access for about four years now. Pretty much every database in the medium to large businesses I have as clients was moved to either Oracle or SQL.

And for good reason. Access is utterly pants :p

I have the opposite experience. I have had many clients in the past, and what I see is that IT departments are wary to install new databases or management does not invest in servers needed to run Oracle or another DBMS - unless we're talking about enterprise level software of course. But how can you suggest Oracle as an alternative for Access anyway???

Employees, still in need to manage their information in a way their current enterprise level applications cannot fulfull, resort to Excel sheets and Access databases. Often created by themselves, or by external people in the case of more complex Access databases.

I also see lots of VBA scripts in Word, or plugins, used to generate housestyled documents, or automate certain tasks.

And then there's Sharepoint. An intranet solution I also see very often, integrated with MS Office. Content managers can type their news postings and other material in Word, and publish it automatically on the corporate intranet.

So far for my practical examples. ;)

Oh, and these are no small companies, mind you. Right now I'm at a international (world leader) in alternative energy with more than 15300 employees.

--Erwin
 
My entire development team and all of product development uses macs

~50 people.

Much of the rest of the company is switching over as well probably next year ~500 people.
 
I've converted over to using macs last year with a macbook and then the iphone and have never looked back. It pains me now when I have to go into work and everything is ran on windows and I have to use my work laptop (Dell) 8+ hrs a day. Does anybody know of any companies that use Macs for the majority of their employees and business. Not that I'm thinking about leaving my company but I'm just curious to see. I've never seen any business' use macs except for the ones I see one apple.com's business section and the little carts in the malls. :D

Chapters/Indigo use iMacs in all their stores in Montreal. Don't know if they have this across Canada and the US but it would make sense if the company had a uniform platform.

Ray
 
Chapters/Indigo use iMacs in all their stores in Montreal. Don't know if they have this across Canada and the US but it would make sense if the company had a uniform platform.

Ray

You just registered for making this post?

May you be the first explaining on how you came upon such an old thread and what made you decide to resurrect it?

I doubt it but one shall never give up hope.
 
We use Parallels on some of our machines. For web design and software testing it's useful to have multiple web browsers and multiple OS's.

At my company we design hardware (semiconductors and boards) and we have to test our end products with every configuration of OS we can think of. Thus we maintain clean copies of all versions of windows from 2000 through 7, including XP, XPSP1, XPSP2, XPSP3. We also have several versions of Unix to test with. We keep the main OS core clean, nothing installed, and on the network. Then as we need them, we copy the image down and do what we want with them. When we are done, we delete the changed image. Works GREAT. This way we know that with a clean system, how our devices will work. We can also quickly respond to customer requests when they have odd configurations. We just build an image to match their configuration then store it off for later use.

All of this on MacBooks! (not even Pro's, we are in the process of migrating to them) They work great for our uses, and we never lose our internet or email when windows goes wacky.

For development, some of our tools are windows only, so they are loaded into a development environment. But because we never use the web or email from those images, they remain clean. When employees leave, we just copy over their development environments and we have a full backup of everything they were doing; no more worrying if they sabotage the project.

Lots of benefits to work in virtual environments. As for the cost, we have MSDN accounts, so we have access to all the OS' and tools already, so no real additional costs.
 
You just registered for making this post?

May you be the first explaining on how you came upon such an old thread and what made you decide to resurrect it?

I doubt it but one shall never give up hope.

A few friends were discussing Macs vs PC's, pros/cons of each, cost of operations, etc ... And so I thought that I would do a web search for some specifics on the subject. In so doing I ran across this thread and added my response. I did not even notice the date of the last entry.

Now, why are you querying my response and my resurrecting an old thread? In other words, what point are you trying to make :confused::confused::confused:

Ray
 
If you want more information on how you can run your business on Macs, head to your local Apple Store and ask to speak with a member of their business team. Nearly every Apple Store has a business department and they can suggest business solutions for you.

Whether you need Point of Sale software, a networking consultant, or an Exchange Server solution, chances are they can point you in the right direction.
After all, their goal is to convert PC-based companies into Mac-based companies.
 
Thank god people are saying that businesses are using Macs!!! Now I don't have to worry about being up to date with the latest windows and learning it. I'm planning on getting a job as a programmer or any other computer related job. Hope OS X prevails in the on coming years! Windows is horrible. Linux isn't bad either :)
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.