Decision times for Windows and Mac OS X

It’s a time of change for operating systems, with the Mac OS gaining market share and IT as well as individual users wrestling with the decision over when — or whether — to migrate from Windows XP to Windows Vista.

The Windows expertise you need

InfoWorld can help you on the Windows decision in several ways.

One is through our Enterprise Desktop newsletter, which corrals our ongoing coverage of the Windows OS, from lab tests to implementation strategies. It draws not only from our Enterprise Desktop blog but also our other Windows-oriented news, Test Center analyses, and blog content as well. For example, the Enterprise Windows blog focuses more on server aspects of the Windows platform.

Another is through our new Windows Sentinel service, which lets you monitor several Windows desktops and/or servers to test the effects of new software or hardware. You’d be helping to build a community of Windows performance data that our Windows Sentinel blog will analyze and report back on real-world trends that will help you more intelligently manage your Windows systems.

Is it time to reconsider the Mac?

After being left for dead a decade ago, the Apple Macintosh has roared back, steadily increasing its market share — to 6.6 percent, according to both IDC and Gartner. Its share in business has also grown, according to Forrester Research, to 4.2 percent.

Our story “Why ‘no Macs’ is no longer a defensible IT strategy”, written by Executive Editor Galen Gruman, argues that businesses can bring in Macs as nearly equal players, thanks to several compatibility-friendly software trends and the availability of IT-class tools for managing the Mac.

Gruman has followed the Mac for some time, first in the early 1980s as an editor in one of the first publications to switch to desktop publishing and then for InfoWorld as its desktop publishing reviewer. After that, he was executive editor of Macworld, in the days when Apple began its migration to PC-standard technology. He was hired at Macworld because he was not a Mac fanatic; some of the contributors even nicknamed him “Mr. DOS-head” when he first arrived. I’ll let him take the story from there:

In the late 1990s, Apple was having an identity crisis, plus it suffered from poor management. The Macs of that era showed the strains. On one side, Apple was facing serious pricing pressure, so it cut corners, resulting in some really iffy machines like the Power Mac 4400. On another front, after it let a few companies create their own Macs based on Apple’s then-current reference architecture, the clones quickly trumped Apple in a price/performance battle. Then its new OS, code-named Copland was a disaster that never saw the light of day. I — along with many others — thought Apple had fumbled the ball so badly that it would never play seriously again.

However, after a few more painful years, Mac OS X came out and was solidly received — much in the way Windows 2000 was at about the same time. A few upgrades later, it became a really good OS, surpassing the good Windows XP on several fronts. Today, Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is considered the best desktop OS available.

During the same era, Apple jettisoned its remaining proprietary hardware (well, it did try to introduce a new DVI standard, but that fell flat): a tacit continuation of a common hardware reference platform strategy it worked on with IBM, Motorola, Microsoft and others in the troubled years. That helped bring prices to PC levels, at least for business-quality PCs, and also made a vast universe of PC-standard hardware essentially Mac-compatible, save the need for Mac OS X drivers.

Then Apple switched to the Intel chip, and a little company called Parallels introduced an inexpensive virtualization product that lets Intel-based Macs run Windows unmodified.

That was the final turning point that made the Mac an option for more than only designers again: good OS, standard hardware compatibility, and ability run Windows if needed.

But IT needs more than that. IT needs manageability for security and data protection. IT needs assurance of software compatibility. In short, IT needs to avoid exceptions. So InfoWorld decided to revisit the Mac in that context, given its resurgence among consumers and small businesses.

As outlined in “Why ‘no Macs’ is no longer a defensible IT strategy,” my conclusions may surprise you:

First, the manageability end has been covered for years. Ironically, that seems to be a secret to everyone outside the education sector.

Second, app compatibility is now much less of an issue thanks, ironically, to the rise of Firefox and Web-enabled apps in general.

But the elephant in the room remains Microsoft, whose continued development of Office for Mac is a key reason why business can consider the Mac as an option. Yet Microsoft’s Mac support never appears to be a true commitment, so Mac users don’t get complete compatibility, and sometimes are forced to go without key components.

Still, even with Microsoft’s unsettled commitment, it’s clear that the Mac can easily be part of the enterprise mix, and not just for your designers.