More Mac Proselytism (lower TCO)

[Wayne]

Sorry..

I know I'm dragging this forum into the dark side of Macs, but again, I haven't been this excited about a platform since 1991...

Survey: Macs cost notably less to support than Windows PCs
By Chris Foresman | Last updated about 18 hours ago
Macs are often the black sheep in the many enterprise environments which have been dominated by Windows for nearly two decades, but the growing consumerization of IT is slowly changing that perception. Though Macs often have a higher up-front price than many business-class PCs, Macs are usually believed to have a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) due to lower support costs. A recent survey of IT professionals in large enterprise environments that have a mix of Macs and PCs overwhelmingly agree that Macs cost less than PCs to support.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/ ... ws-pcs.ars

 

[redrumloa]

Mac is almost stupid-proof, so it just makes sense.

 

[faethor]

Clearly the Amiga is even lower cost

 

[JoBBo]

@ redrumloa

In large corporate environments, Windows PCs are often set up in a way so nobody but system administrators can install software, access USB storage devices, modify system settings, and so on.

So, as far as the risk of 'messing something up' is concerned, there is frequently little difference between corporate MacOS and Windows users. Not to mention that usage of computers in a business context tends to be mostly about applications and less about the OS.


That being said, Macs do have a substantially lower risk of being infected with malware. This is clearly a real-world advantage but it must be mentioned that it has nothing to do with the security architecture of the MacOS itself, which gets frequently cracked open at hacking competitions before either modern Linux' or Windows' counterparts. MacOS appears to be less secure than Microsoft Windows 7, but its limited user base provides insufficient financial incentives for commercial hackers to focus any resources on this platform.

@ Wayne

It must be emphasized that, even if the TCO may be lower if you strictly look at the hardware and support costs, the result would likely look very, very different if a company switched all employees to Macs and the TCO figures included a) the costs for retraining every employee (Mac courses) and b) temporary productivity losses (which are bound to happen during the transition period when employees have yet to become as comfortable with Macs as they are with Windows systems).

From a business manager's perspective, the hurdles are quite high to make a switch to Macs economically viable within a reasonably short timeframe.

 

[ilwrath]

In large corporate environments, Windows PCs are often set up in a way so nobody but system administrators can install software, access USB storage devices, modify system settings, and so on.

So, as far as the risk of 'messing something up' is concerned, there is frequently little difference between corporate MacOS and Windows users. Not to mention that usage of computers in a business context tends to be mostly about applications and less about the OS.

Agreed. I want to know where they found the administrators for their Windows systems that are so inefficient. A _WELL CONFIGURED_ Windows 2003 or 2008 domain with XP, Vista, and W7 clients should be cake to administer. You can literally configure everything from domain policy based on placing computers and users into role-based groups. Your programmers can have access to debug tools, your engineers can have access to ports, your receptionists can be locked down so they can't install every ActiveX plug in known... And, should anyone need to get promoted, moved, demoted, a couple minutes of switching around their OU's and you're all set.

Plus Windows PCs have lots of disk imaging tools and techniques. If something does compromise a workstation, just re-image it. Your OU policies should have already been forcing them to be saving their data files on the network file shares, anyhow. (redirect My Docs, Outlook, etc...) Makes backup policy a breeze, centralized copies reduce overhead and there are less outdated versions floating around, etc...

All the tools are there. Just a lot of administrators don't use them. It would be interesting to find out the honest total cost of a good administrator vs. a "cheap" one, regardless of platform.

 

[Glaucus]

Or maybe it's just that the bulk of the workload is done on the PC? Similar to the top rated cars list in that other thread, comparing amount of effort to admin a network between platforms needs to correct for the type and amount of work being done by the network users.

 

[faethor]

Security? Mac OS X is more vulvernable. Windows is more attacked LINK