SteveW928, it's pretty clear you've never worked for a big company or had to deal with a departmental budget.
Umm... I'm not talking about the actual reality many people face when taking on stupid companies or IT departments. There are plenty (in fact a majority) of companies who don't seem to look at the big picture properly when working between departments or setting budgets.
Plain and simple, acquisition of laptops are a budget line-item. Sometimes they come out of corporate, sometimes they are an expense to your department. Spending $2500 on a Macbook Pro versus spending $700 on a bulk-purchased Dell, well, multiply that by 10,000 employees and then have to answer to the CFO for your budget.
Well, we'll overlook the fact that the $700 Dell is a PoS that will require an earlier replacement. And, that most don't need to pay $2500 for an Apple laptop (try $1200-1800). (I'm not sure why you'd choose to compare a top of the line 17" Apple laptop to a cheapie Dell... other than in hopes of fooling people into believing your argument.)
Once again (maybe you need to go back and read my earlier posts again), if you have employees who make $50k-100+k/yr (double that with benefits), and you slow them down because of unreasonable IT restraints, your cost savings disappear rather quickly. Do most companies measure this or take it into account, nope. My argument is that this is dumb, not that it doesn't happen.
Wow. Why should IT support random platforms? IT departments do not just support anything you feel like having.
I think you might be forgetting the role of IT. IT supports the technology utilized within a company. The true client of IT are the workers of the company driven by the goals of the company. Unfortunately, most IT departments become self-serving. They don't ask what technologies would be of greatest benefit to the workers and goals, but what costs them the least and can be most easily managed by them. Again, Lotus Notes is a perfect example of this (giving up productivity for ease of deployment and control).
Also, I never said random platforms... but there is no good reason an IT department shouldn't be able to support the best platforms for particular jobs. The most efficient and technologically advanced companies I worked with used Macs for most of the users, PCs in a few roles where they were the best, and combinations of Windows/Macs/UNIX in the server room.
I'd admit that there are less gains today by doing so than in the past, but it is also way easier to support multiple platforms today. Any IT department that can't handle Windows/Macs/Unix should be fired and replaced by one that can.
Should they support Linux too?
On the desktop? I'd say no, as while it might save some costs here and there, it isn't really beneficial. In the server room? Do I have to answer that? Is there an IT department that doesn't support Unix in the server room? Sheesh!
Further, more and more IT is being outsourced as the in-house IT support staff is being shrunken.
That could be good or bad. If they are outsourcing just to save costs, I'd say dumb. If they are outsourcing to get some fresh ideas in because they have a stupid IT department of the type I've been talking about, it could be pretty positive.
Very often bean counters rise to the top and they're all about meeting budgets and cutting costs, maximizing profits, and increasing the stock price -- all things the Board of Directors likes. IMO it's short sighted and leads to a death spiral that kills innovation, but it is a fact of big corporate life.
Yep, that's stupid... and unfortunately a fact of life. No disagreement here.
I've been at several startups, and there is always an "orgy" phase when the company gets its first round of funding where you go nuts buying equipment and indulging every geek purchase
Agreed... equally dumb. How about a happy-medium?!?!
Maybe you're in college, maybe you've never worked for a big company, maybe you've never worked at a company when money isn't flowing from a fountain.
Well, I was recently in college... working on my Masters degree for my 2nd career, Christian apologetics.
I spent the prior, nearly 20 years, working in IS/IT. I've owned my own consulting firm, as well as worked (most recently) in a Fortune 100 (nearly Fortune 50) from 2001-2007. I'll let you decide what the economic climate was. Our department was the most profitable in the company, and we used primarily Macs. We used Macs, Windows, and Unix in the server room... though because of the restrictions we were always battling from the main IT arm of the company, we didn't get to do as much as we could have (being the most profitable division, though, does buy one a bit of clout). And, we were the most profitable division largely because of the technology we were using, BTW.
I also had clients in the past with my consulting firm of which I spoke of above. They were FAR ahead in what they were doing with their computer systems at the time, which gave them a huge competitive advantage. They weren't like this at first. When I first started working with them, they had more of the bean-counter mentality. However, I talked them into getting new machines for a small set of employees first. After they saw how much more productive that group was, they upgraded all the rest of their equipment (in phases). Sure, there are financial realities... even this company couldn't do it all in one shot. But, again, a new computer, in the grand scheme, is peanuts compared to other corporate expenditures.
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Originally Posted by SteveW928 "Apple made a lot of gains by going Intel, but at the time of the transition, performance wasn't one of them. I wrote an article about this back in 2006:"
Your article was misguided then.
The original Core Duo Macbook Pro would smoke any G5 if they were both running the same Universal app.
Maybe you should read it.... I included real-world benchmarks. The MacBook Pro, didn't, in fact, 'smoke any G5'. Nor, were the Pentiums at the time 'smoking' the G5s. That's kind of the point. Sure, they saw the power and performance advantages to come, but at the initial transition, pure performance was held by the G5. The problem was the power/performance, as they weren't going to be able to put a G5 in a laptop.
