Hi Jason,

I’ve always believed that IT folk love Windows because it keeps them employed. IT departments would shrink to about 20% of their size if they were using Macs, for example.

Win boxes just aren’t managable without adding so much complexity that it becomes unaffordable or wickedly complex. Like I said, it’s great for sysadmin job security.

The ideal of having one kind of everything is nice, but it’s only a benefit if that one kind of thing isn’t overpriced and accident-prone.

I love working at home now. I’m my own BOFH. :-)

Jim

Jim:

We were a 100% Mac shop about five years ago, and since have moved to Windows. Now, our support issues have actually gone way down; our PCs are much more stable, and much more powerful as well.

When you say that the Windows boxes are only manageable with added layers of complexity, what do you mean? I can’t think of anything that we’ve had to layer on top of our machines to make them more manageable, stable, useful… they just do what they have to do, and we don’t have to worry about them.

And the whole notion of crash-prone WinNT isn’t very applicable to us, either — for the most part, our big database machines (which do thousands to tens of thousands of transactions a day, minimum) get rebooted maybe once every three months or so. Again, there’s nothing special there, just out-of-the-box Intel-based machines with an operating system and a database, and happy stability.

And lastly, in terms of cost — Macs were much more expensive for us. We can put machines markedly nicer, faster, and with more memory on our desktops when they’re PCs, and save money for nicer networking hardware to play with. :)

/jason

When you say that the Windows boxes are only manageable with added layers of complexity, what do you mean?

Remote software install w/o SMS. And SMS is a nightmare.

And the whole notion of crash-prone WinNT isn’t very applicable to us, either

I specifically didn’t say crash-prone, I said accident-prone. I know NT isn’t crash-prone. I’ve been running it at home alongside my Macs since 96.

NT isn’t as bad as 95, but even to a small extent with NT, things would just act up for no reason, usually registry corruption or something wierd like that. It’s easy to blow away prefs files and zap PRAM and rebuild the desktop on the Mac, but you pretty much have to reinstall Windows when that happens, and then reinstall all the software. You wouldn’t have to reinstall software on a Mac after it had a system re-install, depending on how you did it.

It’s good to hear your costs went down. I know of a few cases personally where the kind of work people were doing with their computers could have warranted 1 or 2 mac tech people for 200 desktops, compared to 5 or more PC sys-admins.

Perhaps my opinions are weighted to much from the horrible experiences the companies i’ve worked for have had with their LANs. I was only in the help-desk/sys-admin role for a short while — most of the time I was looking in, but with close relations to the IS techies.

We don’t run SMS; we really don’t have to do remote software installations. Most of our applications are browser-based and accessible off our intranet, so that works in our favor. Besides — how do you do remote software installs on Macs? I can’t think of a way that doesn’t involve the same adding of layers on top of an already layered operating system.

And maybe we’re just lucky, but we really haven’t had the accident-prone experience that you’ve had. Things don’t just act up; if something breaks, it’s because I broke it, and I almost always know what I did. And if it is an operating system issue, you never have to reinstall from scratch; Windows NT allows you to reinstall on top of the old version, which then acts like a repair. Honestly, when I reinstall from scratch, it’s usually because I want to — a new machine, a completely new role for a machine, or something like that.

I think that you’re right about how your opinions, and mine, are weighted — this is one of those issues where people are just in one camp or another, and I definitely was once in the Mac camp. Now I find myself very satisfied with my Windows experience, and every time that I have to work on or with a Mac, I’m generally unhappy. Right now, we’re struggling to keep some of the new G4s up and running; out of the box, they are crashing left and right, and it’s just a huge pain in the butt. So goes life.

I think that you’re right about how your opinions, and mine, are weighted — this is one of those issues where people are just in one camp or another, and I definitely was once in the Mac camp.

:-)

Let’s just put it this way. I’m not so much pro-mac and anti-windows as I am anti-half-witted-BOFH-who-cant-actually-run-a-decent-network.

It seems fairly obvious you know what you’re doing, and don’t fit into that class… :-)

But when the network you work on is controlled by the scheming BOFH type, you’re screwed! :-)

Anyway, I don’t know if you’re maybe lucky, as you say, or if I’ve been unlucky, but it’s neat how perception is skewed just as much by one’s personal history as by what you’ve read and understood about a subject.

Jim