With the barriers lowering, and other market factors creeping in, Macs are slowly making a move into the enterprise. While this may/may not solely be Apple driven, the fact is that people like choices, and the Macs are now far more compatible with other systems than they once were, so finally folks have options. In my recent travels to Woods Hole we had ~14-15 developers from around the world, and there were 4 Macs there. Of course we had the normal thing where someone couldn’t get something working in Windows, Mac folks would chime in with, “just works on a mac” and later when Mac folks couldn’t plug a projector into the certain Macs, the windows folks throw the, “just works in windows”, so it was all in good fun. So while I don’t consider these folks “enterprise” as in working for a corporation, it clearly shows that more people can use what they want, and have IT adapt for their needs. I talked to a friend up there about his MacBook Pro – it’s a beauty of a machine, and he loves it b/c he can do everything he needs, plus run windows for dev work that you can only do in Windows. Of course if I had such a beast it’d be running Linux, and that’s my argument for my buying my Dell laptop; while the Apple is nicer, it was also ~2500$ more than the Dell. Yes, maybe when my work buys me a ‘top I’ll rethink it – but now I’m thinking smaller again – and I really like the Xseries Thinkpads (used be by IBM, but now it’s Lenovo – but the same otherwise) and they’ve always had excellent Linux ability. two devs in WH had those, and I had to borrow them – not to work on them, just to pick them up – nice and light, thin, but with high screen resolution. of course for a full fledged system like thatI could also look at the MacBook which shares most of the Thinkpads features – but for a Mac I’d prefer the black MacBook after my long, drawn out suffering with my old iBook…but I digress. Now, what was the question? Oh yeah, more Macs in the workplace, yeah, it’s how I’ve always said it should be, and it’s more that way now. I run Debian Linux at work now, on my work provided HP desktop machine, on my personal Dell laptop when I bring it, on my Development server, and (soon) on my production server. What kind of support do I need from IT? Gimme an IP and a gateway IP and I’m all set. So, in conclusion, I believe four reasons for Apple’s success with people using more Macs at work is due to the following reasons:
look lout honey, cause I'm using technology
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Commentary: AB sold to InBev
Where there's Life...there's Bud!
NOTE: As a St. Louis native, I was asked to comment on the sale of local St. Louis brewer Anheuser-Busch to European beverage conglomerate InBev. The following are my comments from the thread.
A couple of things here, AB has been a big STL employer for years sure, but just because they’re big doesn’t mean they’re good. Look at other big employers here; Boeing, AG Edwards and now AB – while they’re headquartered here, they’re not much more than bragging rights for St Louisans – just because they’re based here, they’re far from ‘local’. They’re all multi-national corporations which means the money is a) not staying here and b) is fluid, ready to be munched up by the next corporation up the chain, which leaves the employees as a line item – so much for loyalty. So why should a local market worry about a corporation that doesn’t care about them?