I really like
Ken Rockwell's web pages, I appreciate and highly value his photographic advice. I bought my Nikon D200 largely on his recommendation as a professional photographer. However, he is highly opinionated, and sometimes his opinions are wrong. I respect Ken's opinion on photographic matters because he is a highly-skilled professional photographer who takes great photos. However, his article entitled
Why Pros Use Macs is just plain wrong. As an IT professional, I could be accused of not liking Macs because of the (completely false assumption that) they "don't require support." As Ken says, "Computer support departments HATE Mac because Macs don't need computer support departments."
This is untrue, and I'll tell you why right now: IT shops don't like Macs not because they don't require support, but because they cannot be managed. Let me emphasize the subtle but highly important difference here. If I am Joe IT support provider and have 20,000 workstations to manage in my company, I want an OS that allows me total control over deployment (imaging via Ghost or SMS OSD.) I want a domain to allow me to do single sign-on, and I want it to use LDAP and Kerberos, not antiquated duct tape solutions like Netinfo. I want management tools like SMS and Group Policy that allow me to mass-configure users' systems and enforce rules for every part of the way the OS works, and write my own rules (ADMs) if they don't exist out of the box, and I want to deploy these using my domain to large groups of systems at once. I want management programmability afforded by industry-standard technolgies like WBEM, implemented as WMI, which allow me to write complex custom management tools that are non-trivial and let me manage my infrastructure in a unique and time-saving way. And last but not least, I want a rich, safe, easy to use programming environment that is standards-based and extensible, like .net. As Ken so frequently says, use what works. Windows just supports all of this out of the box with XP Pro and Server 2003. Server 2003 just basically does everything except SQL out of the box.
Ken also thumbs his nose at
Vista. He says it will never ship and is buggy. This is just what he read in a magazine. I have been using every Vista CTP since Beta 1. It works great and keeps getting better every month. This is my system running B1 way back last fall. Here you go:
As someone who actually uses the product daily and is highly involved on a professional level with deploying the OS in a large environment, I can tell you it will deliver on Microsoft's promises and more.
You don't have to take my word for it, and don't believe the Microsoft-bashing FUD. Everyone loves to bash Microsoft. MS-bashing is a
cliche at this point. What most people don't realize is the
extremely hard work and innovation that Microsoft puts in to every product. This has been exponentially increasing lately. MS products are rapidly approaching the point where they are as good as or better than Mac OS or Linux. They already far surpass either of these OSes for management functionality, and that is why IT professionals use them. If things continue along this trend, and I fully expect them to, they will pass Mac OS X in terms of ease of use and security within the next OS cycle. As Rob Short says,
an OS is just a snapshot of where it's going.
Use what works.
It's interesting to me that hard-core Mac people often brag about how frequently Apple throws out new OSes, as if this is a good thing. The thing about this is, their new OSes vary very little from one version to the next. They do not make huge improvements. In the Windows world, these minor improvements (or, in the case of ICF and SP2, not so minor) are called service packs, and they don't require you to re-install the entire OS. I used to be a hard-core Mac user when I didn't have 400 computers to manage. In that entire time (1986-1998) their only major advance was partially implementing swapping in System 7. They never even got around to doing true preemptive multitasking! I remember writing Pascal programs for Mac OS that were inside huge while-loops so that you could share time with other programs. If you didn't do this, everything else came to a halt until your app quit. OS X is Apple's only true major advance, and it wasn't even written by Apple. Since then they have just added small bits of bling to the OS for which you have to pay in the (non-trivial) amount of time you have to spend re-installing your OS from scratch. This happens every time Steve decides to drop a useless new feature in, such as the horrible widget implementation. When they do decide to add something useful it frequently ends up being borrowed from someone else who did it first, and is a non-optimal implementation. Because of this, OS installs end up being a yearly ritual for OS X users. The dirty little secret of this whole thing is, unless you do a clean install of OS X, you run a severe risk of ruining your whole OS, just like Windows. It's no different.
I have a Mac at home, and it's a great system. Macs are great by themselves, for single users or small businesses that cannot afford IT departments. When you have more than 50 computers, you reach a critical mass where you need robust management tools, which are almost non-existent in Mac OS and Linux. I don't want to come off as a Mac-basher, because I am not. Macs are great computers. I covet a
Macbook Pro in the worst way, even if it does have a dumb name. I have an iPod nano because it is by far the best music player on the market today. I have a Mac at home because it's a great stand-alone box. I have a Nikon D200 because it is a great camera. I have an xbox to play games on because it's a wonderful console. I deploy desktop workstations that run Windows XP Professional at work, because I
use what works.
