23 replies to this topic

[tim_s]

Hi Everyone,

In my company I have watched the design department phase in to Macs from Windows, to only be phased back out into Windows again.


Mainly this comes in from the directors of the Marketing department and the staffing at the time but I was wondering,

A: Are people seeing this within their work place?

B: What sort of uses does your company find Mac still dominates.

(So help me god IF Mr. XXIV jumps in recommending mac minis for servers lol – I am just kidding buddy.)


Right now in my IT department we have 2 Macs,

1: My current laptop

2: We have an iMac to confirm what the design department is seeing on the websites.

** We did have sort of Mac revival.

[C:Amie]

At one client on my books Mac users got left alone behind closed doors for 12 months and when someone (me) decided to look in on them we discovered that they had been reproducing at an alarming rate; more than doubled in those 12 months in fact.

My intention is to scale it back drastically. Personal views aside, the client has spent millions on PC infrastructure and support services only for these departments to basically now be demanding bespoke IT services, have no security integration or oversight and no backup policy. There isn't a standardised <anything> amongst them and it is not cost effective; I'm not putting a Mac server infrastructure in, we certainly will not be adjusting AD to support them and we're not going to hire anyone in to support them either.

The second that one of them has a data loss issue it will be the IT department that gets the raw end of the whip, so a stand must be made.

It makes me sick to think of the money that has been wasted on overpriced IT lip gloss, done for no business reason other than a lifestyle choice in an environment where there is no BYOD policy.

So:
A) Yes
B) Ego, attempts to escape policy directives / oversight and "it looks pretty". Funnily enough most of them spend 90% of their time being used for e-mail, nothing more

[REM2000]

i love mac's i use one at home as my primary system (iMac), however ive always kept my work and personal configs/thoughts seperate.

To this end our company needed to do some more video editing and some stuff with photos.

The photos was easy, the users needed photoshop (basically the creative suite). however as this product is the same on both Windows and a Mac this made the software neutral.

The second was video editing, i asked the users and none had direct/professional experience with any product, some had murmurs that they have heard of final cut. So based on this i brought a set of Microsoft Windows PC's, these were ramped up in spec's however the TCO was much higher, first i would have to train some of the staff that had not used mac's (about 50%) the next would be the purchase of the equipment compared to the discount i could get on the Windows hardware. Next we already run a Windows network with AD so the infrastructure is around Windows.

I agree with others that sometimes people will say mac's in the same way people who just want to crop a picture will ask for photoshop. If there is a legitimate reason then i get it, i simply get whatever tool people need to do the job they need, i like to think im quite open minded.

I don't think there's anything wrong with mac's in the workplace, when staff have the skills and there is a good reason to have them, they work incredibly well, however i can easily say the same for a Windows network also.

I think generally people (and i don't blame them) attach too much personal attachment and forget these are business tools just like photocopiers, the stationary cupboard and projectors.

[rkenshin]

My company uses a combination. Our subsidiary company, a graphic design/advertising company uses Macs. That's obvious, as most graphic company's use Macs with Photoshop and Illustrator running all day, as well as photography (even though our turn tables only work in Windows, so they use a VM).

My primary company, however, uses a combination of both. Mostly our developers are using Macs, which in my IT viewpoint, its pointless. They are doing nothing but coding, and it can be done on any platform. Instead, my organization gives the developers what they want so they stop complaining. In their eyes, however, the dev's ask for Macs because they aren't as locked down as the Windows systems are in my organization. The supervisor that runs this team is providing his team systems they don't even want. I've talked to several Dev's and they prefer to code on Linux or Windows, not a Mac. However, they aren't given a choice as the supervisor only will provide a Macbook to his team. Again, it comes back to the fact that our organization currently doesn't have the Mac "locked down" as the other machines in organization.

However, that will soon be changing.

A. Yes and No, as we have a combination of both.
B. Developers and our Advertisement/Graphic Design subsidiary company.

[the evn show]

Occasionally I'll do contract work for very famous web development shop, (you've certainly seen and used their work). Rough guess I'd say about 30% of the company is on a Mac. All the designers, maybe half the developers, and I know the project managers prefer them. Servers are typically linux with Windows for active directory.

The firm I used to work at (a traditional advertising agency) was 100% mac save for one PC that ran some specialty software that shuttled the payroll info to the bank. Even the XServes running VMs for things like mail, web development, dns, etc. Final deployment typically happened on Linux servers (CentOS via heroku or media temple) but the majority of their work was typical print/television/radio advertising + show homes and apartment suites so it was mostly FCP Studio+Adobe CS.

The company I'm at now--an outsource lab that does food-stuff testing (ie: how much ethanol can you expect from this sample of raw corn)-- has maybe 15-20% macs. They're used by various office staff, some designers in the marketing department, a couple of the IT trolls, and as application servers for software that requires a UNIX servers (actual certified, we paid the money to open group UNIX) to run on as a cheaper alternative for their AIX and HP/UX systems. They'll use whatever is mandatory to run their hardware so you'll find an Amiga in one place, an old Win 98 system in another. Some of the equipment is older than me but still running basically unchanged from when it was purchased. As far as I'm concerned most of this stuff is just a serial port or ip address that responds to some strange custom protocol - nobody really uses these things, they're just interfaces for hardware that measures some chemical or physical property. The interfaces people actually use are more like a microwave or photocopier - no keyboard/mouse/gui.

I also do some contract programming work for a manufacturing company -- connecting industrial equipment to a central server that controls the process based on old statistical data (ie: increasing the bake time at stage X if ambient temperature increases Y degrees or if moisture sensors detect >= Z humidity at some stage Z). The IDE to build stuff only runs on 32-bit Windows but the compiled applications go through this dreadful runtime thing and will ultimately end up on AIX+Oracle. The staging environment is a Mac+VMWare -> Windows+MS SQL. I don't know why: the idiot who was here before me set that up and it's not worth the time to change it. So far as I know the rest of the company is running exclusively on Windows for office/outlook + some sort of citrix connection to run one-off software on their AIX servers. They're evaluating tablets to go paperless in their production area - iPads are currently winning (better battery life and wireless performance than the Windows/Android options they've tried) but I suspect ultimately it'll go to some sort of "toughbook" style tablet. They're going to be thin clients for software that run on a server somewhere so the OS doesn't really matter.

I'm not representative of industry in general. I tend to be very picky about where I work which means I'm not going to end up in a company where they say "We use PHP and Windows 7" or "It's C#.Net all the time" here. Likewise, I'm not going to take a job where I can't choose which tools I use or have some input into the hours I work. Most of my career has been as management but for the last year I've been writing code while I finish another degree. It's much easier to work part-time as a programmer than a managerial-type and there's enough work out there that I don't need to give up autonomy in order to pay my bills.

[Javik]

The charity I do volunteer work for is all Windows thankfully, even the laptops used for graphics design are Windows laptops.

[Growled]

My employer is Windows only. My boss asked me recently if I thought we needed a Mac. I asked him what for? He didn't have an answer for that so that was the end of the conversation. I have nothing against Macs but I don't think you can beat Windows in the workplace. The amount of software available for Windows is just amazing.

[AWKM]

We have windows only in my work (web design/development firm). We have precisely 1 mac mini which is used to in our "board room" to display some google spreadsheets and occasionally some youtube videos at work parties. About all it's useful for in my opinion.

[Simon-]

As a competent IT person, I support whichever platform the clients wants to use, as long as they pay me for it, I do not push my personal thoughts/agenda others and will happily integrate a Mac into a Windows environment or Vice-versa (or Linux, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, or whatever) as much as is technically possible to do so and they are paying me for the time to make this happen.

A bit immature to refuse to integrate Macs because they are "overpriced IT lip gloss" IMO. If the Macs support the application needed for the job as good as Windows, then it makes no difference to me if the client wants to use a Mac to do that, it is their money to choose whatever they want, not mine, and in reality if you compare a Mac to a similarly priced PC, they are not very much more expensive.

[Long Dong Silver]

Being a Video Editor, my whole world revolves around Macs. People don't even talk about Windows in my field.

[Gotenks98]

I work in a University and for the most part we have a mix of both. However the macs that are out there are just for show, there is absolutely no reason to have them. We have no applications written for mac. In most cases if there is no webclient for whatever application thats being used the user's system is either bootcamped, or virtualboxed or the user connects to a citrix VM to get the job done. I think part of why we have as many macs as we do is because there are some die hard mac fans.

[Mr.XXIV]

God can't help you now Tim.

No seriously, I wouldn't recommend a Mac Mini to a designer, as a designer. The color profiling on an external monitor is deeply frustrating.

[vhane]

We have a healthy mix at my workplace. Our developers get to pick what client OS they want to run. Most are on OS X and Linux. Windows is the minority. As for the cost of Apple gear, yes, they tend to be more expensive than the PCs. However, the cost of the equipment is negligible compared to what the developers cost the company. Makes sense to let the developers use whatever environment they are most productive in.

[+Chicane-UK]

A lot of people use them where I work but, bafflingly, end up using Windows VM's most of the time or RDP'ing to other machines to get the work done that they need because 99% of the apps they use are Windows based and not available on the Mac.

[68k]

I believe Windows [7] has better window management, leading to increased productivity.

Unfortunately, there are few Mac users at my workplace running OS X - they all run Windows, due to the apps they use only being available for Windows.