Mac meets world

At InfoWorld, we just completed a rollout of a new content management system, a major project for a content company. Since so many people touch content at InfoWorld, the project has turned out to be a mix of systems integration and business process management with a heavy dose of good old-fashioned business process re-engineering. Any time you roll out an enterprisewide system and affect all your users, issues in your overall IT environment arise. As this project completed, I spent a lot of time thinking about the business ramifications of the operating systems we're running on the desktops and on the back end.

First, as much as I love Apple products (I'm drooling over the new PowerBooks with the rest of you and listening to my iPod as I write this), integrating the Macintosh into an enterprise environment can be particularly challenging and frustrating both from a technology and management perspective. With few exceptions, software vendors who make software for Macintosh and Windows put product development for the Macintosh on the back burner, so many products that offer support for Mac users are flakier on the Mac than they are on PCs. In InfoWorld's case, Microsoft Word is the key backbone of our workflow and Word on Windows and Macintosh differ in significant ways when you're developing applications around them on the back end. Since 85 percent of our users are on Windows, from a business execution perspective, I have to lean towards solving the problem completely for the larger user population and leaving the other 15% with various workarounds. Unfortunate, but that is reality.

None of this makes Windows a technically superior OS, it's just a simple case of software vendors reacting to a market that is still dominated by Microsoft. Of course, the IT staff can make anything work given the time and money, but with ever-tightening IT budgets and even less time for IT staffers to solve problems, chief technologists have to go with the thing that works for most people — and works now — and that thing is too often Windows. Despite the amazing Macintosh UI and its solid Unix-based OS, Mac users often still lose in the realities of the corporate environment where the cost of the "switch" urged in the current Apple ad campaigns is considerable. From a management perspective, Mac users in an enterprise present an interesting conundrum as they are a relatively small proportion of users (in most companies at least) who are often the most passionate and vocal about protecting their platform. If you're a CTO, you know what I'm talking about — the Mac users are the first to ask about Mac compatibility and enterprise software vendors are the last to give you a straight answer on the issue.

From a financial perspective, Apple does have a certain fiscal attraction. The unlimited and affordable client license terms available for OS X Server beat Microsoft handily from a cost perspective, but a real problem arises: if I choose Apple, regardless of the current value of their offerings, I'm locked in on the hardware and software side. I've experienced this kind of lock-in before. As we finished our content management system rollout, we also re-engineered the InfoWorld.com back-end to be 100 percent Linux, pulling out the last remaining vestiges of our proprietary Sun Sparc hardware running Solaris and taking advantage of the aggressive commodity pricing in the Intel-based server market and the free Linux OS. Sun equipment is great, but ultimately, our business couldn't keep financial pace with their systems.

If I'm lucky, my smart fiscal planning centered around Linux will result in a bonus that will allow me to get what I really want: the new PowerBook with the 17-inch screen — aren't they incredible?