Mac marks the enterprise

IN MAY 2001, Apple began shipping OS X on new Macs. Six months later, at the O’Reilly Peer-to-Peer and Web Services conference, it was clear that a sea change was under way. The open-source geeks who flock to these events were flouting Microsoft not with PC notebooks running Linux, but with PowerBooks running OS X. Displayed on their gorgeous Aqua screens was the Mac’s newest and most unlikely killer app: SSH, the secure shell, in all its 80-column, 25-line splendor.

Tim O’Reilly, founder and president of O’Reilly & Associates, is a technology trendspotter. He charts the course of his publishing business by watching the alpha geeks whose entry into various domains (the Internet, Linux, Wi-Fi) is a leading indicator of mainstream adoption. The trick, of course, is to separate signal from noise; the vision of a Unix-based computer with a friendly face is hardly new.

No less an alpha geek than Tim Berners-Lee endorsed that vision when he created the first Web browser on a NeXT cube. That legendary computer, introduced in 1988, had all the essential ingredients of the modern OS X Mac: deep multimedia support, a Unix core, display PostScript, the NeXTStep application framework, and an elegant GUI.

Berners-Lee’s Web changed the world. His NeXT cube became a historical footnote. Now the Macintosh reincarnation is arriving on a new WWW scene, which Release 1.0 Managing Editor Kevin Werbach aptly called “Web services, Weblogs, and Wi-Fi.” Designed to protect Apple’s profitable niche, OS X draws its most avid “switchers” from the ranks of the rest of us.

Now for something completely different

Windows users and, ominously for Sun’s new desktop strategy, Linux users are finding the reborn Mac a pleasant and productive working environment. It is also eminently manageable thanks to its unique heritage. For those enterprise IT planners who are now looking at desktop Linux, cheap software isn’t the main consideration.

What can really trim the total cost of ownership is automated system administration. That requires an architecture and a skill set that grew up on Unix and are still most highly exploitable there.

But the OS X Mac isn’t just another Unix box that you can manage with bash, Perl, or Python scripts. It’s a consumer-friendly system that is successfully managed in places where IT budgets don’t exist and kindergarten teachers double as network administrators. But Apple hasn’t rested on its laurels. Despite its Unix roots, OS X makes end-user administration cleaner and simpler than the classic Mac OS ever did. And with Samba, WebDAV, LDAP, and a host of other standards-based integration technologies, it’s ready to go to work side-by-side with Windows.

Is it conceivable that enterprises will start replacing aging ThinkPads with new PowerBooks? Apple itself isn’t ready to make that pitch. But with the Jaguar release of OS X piling on yet more strategic innovation, it’s clear that a real opportunity has emerged.

The wild card, of course, is software, and that’s where things get really interesting. Desktop applications had reached the baroque stage even before the Web browser hit the reset button on the GUI. As we reel in the baby that was thrown out with the bath water, there’s no guarantee that Microsoft’s Win32 will reclaim its status as the de facto GUI standard.

WinForms, the .Net Framework’s wrapper classes for Win32, is in limbo until the .Net runtime arrives on the desktop. Browser-based XML/XSLT (Extensible Style Language Transformation), Java, and Flash MX are among the Mac-friendly alternatives. None is likely to produce the next Microsoft Office, but that’s beside the point. Office X already exists. So long as the Mac remains a viable platform, Microsoft will be a major Apple ISV. But monolithic suites are relics. The agile enterprise requires lightweight, reconfigurable clients that double as peer servers. That’s always been Apple’s style, and Jaguar updates it for the Web services era.

Consider Jaguar’s new Sherlock. Like Karelia’s Watson, it streamlines access to information that’s otherwise available more clumsily via the Web. While the rest of the industry wrangles over standards, Sherlock’s tagline, “Web services for the rest of us,” is ringing true. When you fire up Sherlock’s movie channel, it shows you your local theaters. How? Jaguar’s address book is system-wide resource available to apps including Mail, iChat, and Sherlock. With iSync, you can beam this data into your Bluetooth-aware cell phone. It’s HailStorm made personal and practical.

Something to iChat about over Cocoa

Apple’s peer-networking legacy shines through in Rendezvous, an implementation of Zeroconf, a proposed Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard for ad-hoc service advertising and discovery using multicast DNS. (Rendezvous is an open-source project; code for Windows and Linux is available.) Rendezvous aims to bring the convenience of AppleTalk’s Chooser to IP networking. At the O’Reilly Mac OS X conference, attendees used it for ad-hoc iChat collaboration. Programmers who want to use Rendezvous in their own applications can do so in AppleScript or in Cocoa, the NeXTStep-derived application framework.

Note that Cocoa currently supports Rendezvous in Objective-C only. Most of Cocoa is also accessible to Java programmers, and Rendezvous will be, but Java isn’t yet a first-class citizen of Mac OS X. Even if it were, Cocoa remains firmly under Apple’s thumb. For the mixed-client enterprise, then, the Mac’s advantages with respect to Java boil down to shared JVM memory and hardware acceleration for Swing.

These kinds of calculations are complex because so many cultures feed OS X: Unix, open source, Java, NeXTStep, and the Mac’s own legacy. As the Macintosh clan soaks up Unix, LDAP, and first-class scripting languages, the Unix tribe is discovering AppleScript, AppleEvents, and most crucially, a refined end-user sensibility. The world has never seen, until now, a Unix computer that the average computer novice could use.

As a result, the fierce creativity and boundless energy of the open-source community has been focused almost wholly on back-end infrastructure. That infrastructure is necessary, but insufficient, for the business Web to succeed. Connecting people to services is the real engineering challenge, and there’s no Windows monopoly on how to do it. The marriage of the Mac and open source could be a wellspring of innovation.

It’s fun to speculate, but where does the rubber meet the road? Apple points out that its own $6 billion business runs mainly on Macs. Of course, that’s a crazy idea for mainstream enterprise IT. As crazy as running DB2 on Linux.

Return to the Special report: Apple unpeeled package.

Forum: Pick a side in the debate between Test Center analysts P.J. Connolly and Tom Yager over Apple’s enterprise worthiness.