Why OS X Doesn’t Provide An Advantage In Enterprise

David Jericho revisits his complaints about the airport express and ends with the comment:

To that end, try as I might, from borrowing and using my sisters 1.2GHz iBook for a month, to using Kirsten’s G4 machines at home exclusively I remain unconvinced. I fail to see a use for the hardware (and the price tag – although the laptops have come down), and I just can’t see what benefits the software offers anyone in an enterprise.

Of course, as always, I’m willing to be reeducated and ask those who can tell me why it is ready for the enterprise, or why exactly OS X is better than an appropriately setup Windows XP system to come forward and brain me.

Apple have never really targeted the enterprise.  The main reason you don’t see a big advantage to OS X in the enterprise is because there’s not a lot that makes a difference to enterprise desktops.  There are a lot of management tools and servers that make a big difference to administration costs, but reducing user frustration isn’t particularly important since you have professional system administrators taking care of that side of things.  Also, more and more enterprise software is becoming web-based so the actual OS doesn’t matter much for them.

The real benefits of OS X come through when you give it to your grandmother who’s never used a computer before – there tends to be far less maintenance and hassles with OS X than with Windows and a far simpler learning curve than with Linux.  In the enterprise though you just won’t notice much of that – particularly if you’re trying to integrate with an existing Windows network because you get all the hassles of a Windows network as well as the hassles of cross-platform compatibility.  Perhaps you’d find advantages to OS X in the enterprise if you built the entire infrastructure around OS X but it’s hard to say since I don’t know of any significant instances of doing that.  I suspect you’d probably find that Apple’s management tools and server offerings are a little immature anyway.

The other thing you’ll find is that using any new OS for a month doesn’t really give you an appreciation for what’s good about it if your skills are so highly developed in a different OS.  For instance, I have three machines on my desk at home, one Windows, one Linux and one OS X but I almost exclusively use the OS X box because a) it’s the laptop I carry around with me everywhere but b) that’s where my skillset is most highly developed (and I know about all the applications to install that make life so much more pleasant).

I suppose the big question though is, what requirements do you have that aren’t being met by your current Windows XP setup?  If there aren’t any major requirements being unfulfilled then there’s no possible way that any other setup could impress you.