German company switching 12,000 desktops from PC to Mac | Hacker News Reader

German company switching 12,000 desktops from PC to Mac

9to5mac.com

13 pointscmcginnis33 comments

You know, back in the day, it was normal for everyone to have two computers on their desktop. There would be a generic PC running Windows with a 14" monitor for word processing and email, and there would be another machine for "actual work". If you were an engineer, it might be a SPARC or RS/6000 workstation. If you were a designer, probably a Mac or an SGI.

Nowadays you can get one box to do everything, a Mac is a Unix workstation that can run a PC in a VM. Why wouldn't organizations switch?

Can someone explain to me why designers should use Mac? I can't see any significant differences between Photoshop and Illustrator run in Windows and Mac.

Shhhh, there isn't. But don't bring that up because it's very cool to use a Mac, it makes you so creative and cutting edge. Rainbows and unicorns and dogs shitting ice cream and all that.

Don't knock the pettable, portable, ice cream dispensers...

What's the name of your guide dog?

There used to be a difference and Adobe and Apple were very good friends many moons ago. Some people can't help but cling to a past where Windows was still only glare on Bill Gates's glasses. (I probably have my history wrong, but you get what I mean)

I didn't say anything about who should do anything. Just telling you how it actually was.

Certainly, back then, if you needed colour management, Mac was by far the easiest/cheapest solution.

I can't tell you why they SHOULD, but I can tell you why some might want to:

Personal OS/Interface preference. I've used Windows 2k and XP for years. I find the OS X interface to be cleaner, easier, and faster to use. I just prefer it. Just like I prefer my new car over my old one. No logic, no stats, just what I feel happier/more comfortable using.

OS Level ColorSync support, which extends through screen calibration, printers, Safari, Preview, Photoshop, etc...

Built-in screen calibration. No, it's not as good as a $ hardware/software package, but it's pretty good, and good enough for web work certainly.

The ability to run any OS/browser combination easily (Parallels or VM Ware). Macs aren't a majority, but they're up there, and depending on your site's demographic, making sure stuff looks right/works on the Mac can be very important. I run OS X/Safari, OS X/Firefox, WinXP/IE6, WinXP/IE7, WinXP/Firefox, Vista/IE7, Vista/Firefox, etc... on my Mac very easily. I can also run my Windows VM at whatever screen size/resolution I want to see how things will look on a 1024/768 display, without hosing my main display/work area.

For whatever reason, using Photoshop on a Mac is easier/better looking for me. I can't back that up, but it's a strong difference for me.

Apple displays generally have better color gamut, than the displays from major PC vendors. Even the photographers I know who choose to use Windows (which is fine), usually use Apple displays, unless their using a very high buck non-consumer display.

I'm sure other folks are much happier using PCs, which is fine. These are just some of my reasons.

They wouldn't switch because of the tremendous cost involved. You have to replace a bunch of already functioning boxes, and for what?

You'd have to expect a pretty large decrease in IT support staff to recoup that cost. For businesses, it's all about the bottom line on the spreadsheet, and the cost of switching from any one OS to another is rarely going to be justified.

Much more likely is a company supporting both for a time, and switching over to the new OS on all new purchases, or allowing employees to choose.

But most companies (in my experience, before some little punk says "but where's your data") tend to replace all their kit every 3-5 years anyway. Those "old" computers didn't suddenly get slower. Unless you're in a business where raw CPU grunt matters, there's no real reason, but they do it anyway.

It's funny, loads of companies in the late 90s ripped out their Unix CAD workstations and replaced them with high-end PCs running NT . No-one batted an eyelid at that. Now we're talking about replacing average PCs with Unix workstations and everyone's like shyeah right.

I think that cycle is a lot longer than 3-5 years now, especially with the economy the way it is. It probably was that way for a while (and was probably even shorter before that) but there seems to be little justification for it anymore. We're finally at a point where a computer from 3 years ago can do everything we need it to do today, and not too slowly either. That's a relatively new development.

Lots and lots of vba written for Excel.

That's a newspaper/magazine publisher. I find this hilarious, because back in the day (mid-nineties) most companies in that industry used Macs. Many IT departments probably completed the switchover to PCs in the early part of this decade (standardization was probably the primary reason) - and now they have to switch back.

You are right!

They switched some years ago for the exact same reasons they mention now from Mac to Windows PCs.

I wonder just how fun a corporate, locked-down, Mac will be.

About as fun as a corporate, locked-down PC is.

That's what I'm afraid of. I was hoping people would be less likely to completely hose a Mac and therefore there would be a lower need for draconian restrictions.

Operating systems are not 'fun', it's like saying my house is 'fun'. It's what you do on or in the OS that makes it fun.

I've experienced this over the years with Linux. I will from time to time install the latest greatest distro, configure it, work out all the little nagging bugs and then ....

Nothing, it's not fun (unless you think getting your graphics card to work and spending 4 hours doing it is fun), in fact the goal is always to get the OS to the point where I can use it ... for something else.

Certain operating systems are more conducive to 'fun' experiences than others, much like houses.

More interesting is this "Until now the highest profile switcher has been Auto Warehouse Co. which is in the midst of a switch of 1000 desktops"

That's it?!? And they're not even done, which means the largest installation is now under 1K.

Shows how far the Mac platform has to go in the 9-5 world.

mac dominates the design/music/film industries though

Any evidence to back this up? I'm a web designer, I know a ton of other designers and they are all either multi-OS capable or fall firstly into the PC camp.

The posers (fresh out of school, concerned about image/style still) usually are using Macs.

/ducks

shrug

Every design team I've worked with, startup or Fortune 500, has been on Macs. Yes, that's just more anecdotal "evidence" but I've been a consultant in several companies over the last ten years.

One Fortune 100 company I worked at had slowly moved the entire web development team (front end and back end) onto Macs. The front end guys liked Photoshop on the Mac, and the OS level colorsync support, and the higher gamut LCDs (versus your run of the mill Dells - no one was springing for the $5k+ displays). The back end guys liked that they could run the same bash scripts and ant execs on their local machines as would be running on the Solaris production servers. Having a 99% compatible bash shell available out of the box, and having the same path separators makes a big difference.

The front end guys 'liked Photoshp on the Mac'? And this was justification to move the entire department over? Uhhhhh, I'm sorry but if I were there and were supervising this department I'd need something more tangible than that to justify spending the company's money.

When both sides of the dev team BOTH want Macs, and can provide both technical reasons (which you skipped there) and have a personal preference for it, then it seems silly for the department supervisor to NOT go along with it.

Plus, the corporate Dells + support plan + etc... are pretty close in price. And our department was responsible for 2 billion+ in corp revenue, so a few Macs are a small price to pay.

I'm glad you weren't supervising our department:)

At one company I worked for, the IT guys hated the macs.

The first reason was that they ended up costing twice as much to match the configurations (extra memory, the requisite software, etc).

The second and more critical reason was support. Apple just wasn't up to the task of handling a call from someone with somewhere between half a dozen and 100 macs at once.

The first reason has been changing in Apple's favor since, and the last time I checked around 4 months ago the cost was pretty much even.

The second I don't know, but one can hope.

Companies often upgrade their hardware every 3-5 years anyway, so the money is a non-issue if it coincided with the cycle.

And it would be a poor manager who didn't take advice from the specialists he employes in making decisions.

Contrary to popular belief, actually Linux dominates the film industry.

http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT5611327583.html

Shocking, real evidence that doesn't back up the widely accepted 'truth' that Macs are for the 'creative people'.

That's a bit skewed by the thousands of machines in render farms that could be running any (free/bundled) Unix. It'll be interesting to see if OSX Server 10.6 gives them a compelling reason to switch.

It isn't likely, since most of the high-end shops have a lot of custom software on those Linux machines, and even their Linux distros are in many cases heavily customized, beyond what they'd be able to do with OSX.

Smaller FX shops that don't have IT staff are much more likely to consider it, unless they rely on software that isn't available in OSX, like XSI.

Which reminds me, now Houdini is available for OSX (it might still be beta, but it's coming if not here already).

It doesn't mean the largest installation is under 1,000. It means the largest all at once switch was 1,000 (at least that was publicized, these things aren't always). Switching from one platform to another is pretty rare.

by the way, it's not any company. it's axel springer, one of the largest media-companies in germany

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