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Macs to Double Marketshare by 2011?

A Gartner study from earlier this year predicts that Apple will double the marketshare of the Macintosh by 2011. Despite my own reluctance to move onto the Mac for my day-to-day machine, I’m inclined to believe the prediction. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out in the broader IT community.

For those of us in the Advertising business, this is nothing new. If the prediction does come true, it will probably have some impact on us as well. Right now, I think we’re fairly typical of Ad Agency’s - We use Mac’s for Creative, and PC’s for everything else. If there were a change in this mix, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more of a split between Macs and PC’s among our Account Service staff. We’re doing a small amount of this now in situations where Creative staff has moved to Account Service rolls, and it hasn’t caused any unsurmountable issues. Part of the increased market share would also come from Agencies moving from a split to all-Mac environments. I think this is much more likely in smaller Agencies. 

How will this impact other businesses? That will be interesting to watch, especially for those of who have lived in a dual-platform world for a while. Will the increased market share come primarily from smaller company’s? Will we start to see the Mac make some inroads into larger company’s? Will it happen with IT’s blessing, or will IT have no choice? Where will corporate IT find folks to support the Mac and deal with cross-platform issues? Who knows, maybe those of us who have been doing this for a while may become a hot commodity.

Virtualization and the Mac

As I mentioned in my previous post I’m in the midst of migrating to a MacBook Pro for my day-to-day computer, and virtualization is a big part of my making the move. I’m running VMWare’s Fusion, and it’s helping make the transition easier by keeping some of my Windows apps close by. As a company, we’re firmly in the Microsoft camp with Exchange and SharePoint, and while both of those products are accessible from the Mac, it’s much easier dealing with them running Outlook and Internet Explorer. In addition, I’ve recently become hooked on Microsoft OneNote, which is not currently available on the Mac.

So far, I’ve been fairly happy with the results. Performance has not been a huge issue, and other than some sizing issues with the drive space I allocated, it’s been smooth sailing. I’m still switching back and forth a bit between Fusion’s Unity mode which allows me to run the Windows apps on the Mac desktop, and the full-screen Windows mode. At this point, about the only time I jump back into full-screen Windows mode is when I need to access something like Remote Desktop which I haven’t yet configured to launch from the OS  X dock.

This isn’t my first foray into desktop virtualization. I used it previously on my Vista laptop, running VMWare’s Workstation product to give myself a virtual copy of XP to switch back to. That worked well for me also, and it provided me a way to easily maintain copies of both Office 2007 and Office 2007 on the same machine. In both cases, virtualization has proved invaluable in giving me with a simple way to keep one foot in two (or more) different camps during OS and application migrations.

All that being said, you also can’t lose sight of the costs associated with virtualization. You do have to license all this software, but it’s still not as costly as doing the same thing with two different pieces of hardware. I think this is a great tool for those of us in IT, but I have some concerns about putting it into end-user’s hands. It’s not always easy configuring and using networks and peripherals. We have a couple end-users trying to run it on MacBook Pro’s, and they are struggling with that aspect of things. Even more troubling from my perspective, we’re starting to get some requests for copies of both Office 2007 to run under their Windows VM in addition to the copy of Office 2008 they are running on the Mac. While I’m sure Microsoft would have no trouble selling me two copies of Office for one machine, it’s a trend which will make this a very expensive option. Something else we’re getting ready to take a look at is application virtualization, probably via Microsoft’s SoftGrid.

What’s even more interesting is watching how Apple deals with virtualization in general. We’re jumping into this in a big way on both the server and desktop, but something is missing - there is no way to virtualize OS X. I have plenty of capacity left on my VMWare ESX servers, and I’d love to add an OS X server into that mix, taking advantage of my investment there as well as the reliability and cost savings it provides. I can’t see Apple sitting this out entirely, but if and when they do jump into virtualization, I suspect they’ll only allow it on Apple hardware. That’s too bad. I think they could sell a lot of software. In fact, if I could virtualize Apple applications in a similar manner, I’d probably purchase 150 copies of Keynote tomorrow.

Migrating to a Mac?

A few years ago I spoke at an IT in the Advertising Business event, and I made the case that IT Directors in this business really need to live in both worlds. I suggested that we should have both Windows and Mac platforms on our desks, and that we should use them both on a daily basis. I still think it’s a valid point, but I haven’t been living up to it myself. In a recent review of the MacBook Pro, it was suggested that one of it’s target users should be the folks administering both platforms. That sounds like me, so when a fairly new MacBook Pro became available I decided to take the plunge. I’m right in the middle of the switch now.

Over the years I’ve moved back and forth between both platforms, and at times I’ve had both platforms on my desk. The single most significant change since I last used a Mac regularly has been the introduction of virtualization on the desktop, and that’s exactly what has brought me back to the Mac now. We’re running VMWare Fusion, and since I’m a glutton for punishment I’m running a Vista VM on my new Mac. Two or three days into this experiment I’m not so sure that was a good idea. My MacBook Pro has 4GB of RAM, and I’ve allocated 2GB to the Vista VM. I’ve heard the hype about virtualization turning Macs into the best Windows machines, but I’m not buying into it - at least not with Vista. The speed on this machine is ok most of the time, but when I’m running a lot of apps I can definitely feel the hit. My Dell laptop (running Vista with 4GB of RAM) definitely outperforms it when I’m multitasking. Still, I’m going to continue using this as my every day machine for a while. It does do a pretty good job running Windows for 90% of what I do, and it really is convenient having both platforms in one package.

I’m keeping the Dell close by for a few more days, but unless my opinion changes dramatically, it looks like I’m finally going to practice what I’ve preached.

Anyone Else Notice an Anti-IT Movement?

Has anyone else noticed a growing trend in IT bashing? I don’t want to sound like I’m whining myself, but I do pay attention to what’s being written, and particularly about things like the iPhone and the Mac’s push into the enterprise. The articles generally have great relevance to our business, and I do like to keep tabs on what others in my position are doing.

However, what have really caught my eye of late are the comments posted on this and similar articles. There are definitely some folks out there who don’t like IT very much, and it’s interesting to hear the arguments. In this article those of us in IT are accused of using “technical mumbo-jumbo” to stall the entry of Macs into the enterprise and to defend our own staffing levels.

I realize that it’s only one individual’s comment in this particular case, but I’ve noticed quite a few of these comments being posted lately. It’s usually found following an article such as this, where the author is discussing Macs or iPhones in the enterprise, but I’ve seen similar comments with regards to IT getting in the way of other things the user wants to do – it might be installing software or bringing in personal hardware.

We face a tough-sell on this stuff. It’s not always easy explaining our policies and decisions without it appearing to be “technical mumbo-jumbo”. Don’t ignore the public relations element of our job, particularly inside our own companies. I’m lucky enough to be right down the hall from our PR folks, and I frequently tap into their expertise when it comes to selling what we do.

Supporting Creative (Part 2)

When I first launched this blog, I pitched IT in the Advertising business as being unique. I also stated that much of that “uniqueness” was due to supporting Creative. Now that I’ve been writing this blog for several months, I’m beginning to wonder if the people we support are truly unique or not. The last time I discussed this topic, I also promised to talk about the differences between the typical IT person and the typical Creative person. I guess it’s time to take a crack at doing just that.

IT people and Creative generally don’t think alike, with IT people tending to be much more logical and Creatives being much more, well, Creative. I guess we could get into the whole right-brain, left-brained thing, but the bottom-line is that we tend to be different. Generally, this doesn’t cause many problems, and in fact we seem to work pretty well together.

There are many users in Creative who just don’t have that troubleshooting mentality when they encounter an issue. A simple example - when a document doesn’t print, try printing a different document, or try using a different printer. Over the years, we’ve found that many of our Creative users do catch on to these relatively simple troubleshooting steps we ask them to take, and now many of them have already tried these things before calling us. The part of this I wrestle with the most is whether they’re really any different from any other department we support in this respect.

However, I do think there are definitely IT types who don’t thrive in this environment. I’ve had IT guys over the years who are outstanding in what they do, but who just don’t have the personality to survive in this particular business. The problem comes when we try to hard down to lock things down, and to force too much structure on our users. It’s probably a whole lot easier to do in a financial environment. I can think of one IT person who struggled in our environment, and who is now thriving in an engineering company.

I’ve also found that you can find ways around the personality issues, but it’s only when you have options available to you because you’re growing. One of the things we’ve done in the past is to move folks who don’t thrive in the desktop support role into backroom IT roles as Systems Administrators. Keep them in the server room where they have less interaction with the end-users.

When I think about supporting Creative due to the personalities involved, I’m just not sure they are all that different from Account Service or other non-Creative departments. I keep coming back to the bigger issues and differences stemming from supporting Creative, and that’s the Mac-PC thing, and the file sizes they routinely deal with. Those issues outweigh by far any personality-type differences

Apple’s Acceptance by Corporate IT

As I mentioned in my previous post regarding the iPhone, the level of general buzz surrounding Apple really seems to be at an all-time high. At the same time, Microsoft seems to be hitting all-time lows with the news stories we’re currently seeing about Vista and Windows 7. As a result, I think we’re going to see some significant inroads by Apple into mainstream IT over the next couple of years, and their market share is going to continue to increase until something changes. I’m just not sure that I see anything significant changing in the near term, so it’s going to be interesting seeing just how large that market share will become.

I think the biggest issue facing Apple is going to be how they handle this growth and whatever inroads they do make into corporate IT. A good example of what I’m talking about is a tool such as Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager. This is comprehensive tool for the deployment, management, and updating of systems across our network. It’s a great tool. Other than some 3^rd party tools, Apple has no equivalent product, but these are the types of tools we need in a corporate IT infrastructure. I realize that 3^rd party tools can fill this void, but the problem with them is that they can breakdown when the systems they support are upgraded. I’ve seen this happen over and over again in both the Microsoft and Apple worlds. It makes sense to me to use Microsoft support tools to support Microsoft OS’s, and it would make just as much sense to use Apple tools to support Apple OS’s.

I suppose we can go with 3^rd party tools in the interim, but I think this is an area which Apple needs to address. If they don’t they’re simply going to reach a point where they’re not going to gain significant ground into corporate IT. Adding Activesync to the iPhone is certainly a step in the right direction in terms of providing this type of support. It will be interesting to see what, if any, tools might begin to appear for desktop and server support.

iPhone Mania

Holy cow! Is anyone else’s e-mail inbox filling up with news items about the imminent changes to the iPhone? Before Noon today, I received 4 different news articles and newsletters featuring headlines and stories about the upcoming announcements which are still a week away. I can hardly wait for next Monday afternoon to see what the actual announcement itself will bring. The buzz Apple manages to create surrounding their product announcements is truly something to be admired.

Yes, I do think the iPhone will make some significant inroads into corporate IT as a result of the upcoming changes, chief among them the addition of 3G and Activesync. We’ve already got between 5-10 employees with iPhones, and they’re already using them to hit Exchange via Outlook Web Access. For us, connecting them via Activesync makes a lot more sense, and it should add some significant security features such as the ability to perform a remote wipe. However, we are an ad agency, so what makes sense for us might not make quite as much sense for other industries.

Frankly, it will be much more interesting to see what happens in those other industries. Will corporate IT be as willing to accept iPhones on their systems? I’m guessing they won’t be as receptive as we are, but I’m also well aware of how difficult it is to say no to the CEO.

Virtualizing the Ad Agency

Virtualization seems to have taken the IT world by storm, and those of us in the Advertising business are along for the ride. I’ve been playing around with virtualization myself for over a year now, and I only see this becoming a bigger part of our business in the future.

It starts at the desktop level, where personally I’ve been running VMware’s Workstation product on my personal laptop. I’ve been running Vista for over a year now, and during that time Workstation has provided me with a convenient copy of XP for those apps which didn’t behave on Vista. The reason I ultimately chose VMware’s product over Microsoft’s desktop virtualization was that it included support for USB devices.

Even more important for those of us in the Agency business at a desktop level, are the possibilities for desktop virtualization the Mac side. Once again, we’ve opted to go with VMware’s Fusion product on our Intel-based Macs. We’re currently struggling with two problems on our Macs which have proven difficult to solve. We’re not huge fans of Microsoft Entourage as an e-mail client, and I could probably devote an entire rant to Microsoft’s decision to drop support for Outlook on the Mac side. We’re also experiencing problems with Mac access to our SharePoint sites. SharePoint works with Safari and Firefox, but as one would expect with a Microsoft app, it works much better with Internet Explorer. We’re hoping that both problems will be solved by actually providing our Mac users with access to Outlook and IE through VMware’s Fusion and a local copy of Windows on their machines.

On the server side, we took the plunge into VMware last year, purchasing ESX Server. We’ve gone fairly slowly in terms of virtualizing our infrastructure, but we’re currently running a SharePoint server, two utility servers, and two development servers as VMs, and we’ve become totally sold on the technology. As a result, we’ve added a second box in order to utilize Virtual Center to aid in the management and to provide load balancing. We’ve also added shared storage via our EqualLogic iSCSI SAN. It all works great, and the possibilities it provides us are endless. If there is a downside, this stuff is expensive, and VMware’s product line and licensing are pretty confusing, and that could give them a problem down the road as Microsoft’s Hyper-V product continues to mature.

We’ve got big plans for virtualization in our Agency. In addition to what we’re doing already, we’re considering virtualization for both high availability and disaster recovery. While we’ve been warned not to virtualize some things, such as domain controllers, Exchange server, and SQL server, we do feel that we can employ a virtual copy in a high-availability or disaster scenario, especially in cases where we maintain the data on a separate platform. We’re also going to explore the possibility of creating a “remote office in a box”, providing us with a quick solution which we could use in acquisitions or the opening of new offices. Our remote offices require a fairly basic setup, and it’s one which we think could be completely virtualized.

We’re going to continue on the path to virtualizing both our servers and desktops. We’ll also be taking a long look at Microsoft’s Hyper-V product. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Supporting Creative

This is another of those interesting issues I mentioned in my first post, and one that I argued makes our industry unique from an IT perspective. Today, I’d like to discuss some of the issues which surround the support of a large Creative contingent.

While I’d like to keep the discussion centered mostly on the people and work, I do think it is worth mentioning that part of the discussion also relates once again to the PC vs. Mac thing. Since the Creative users are all on the Macintosh platforms, they sometimes perceive that IT support is more geared towards the PC side of the house. Because the size of our company dictates that our IT personnel be “jack-of-all-trades”, we’ve never really had the luxury of hiring pure Mac support specialists. We also haven’t ignored the Mac in our hiring of support personnel. Of the 5 people working for me today, 2 of them came from publishing backgrounds where they actually performed Mac support. We also made a point of sending one of our most recent hires off to the remote office he now supports with a Mac PowerBook under his arm. Even though he wasn’t a Mac guy, the users in that office took it as a very good sign that he was willing and able to support the Mac platform. It took them a while to realize that he was spending a lot of his time on a Vista virtual machine running on Parallels, and in the meantime he actually did learn to support the Macs. Gaining the trust of the Creative users is paramount in supporting them, and actually having Macs on our support people’s desk goes a long ways in building that support. One of the big problems in supporting Macs is finding qualified people. Windows support people are a dime a dozen, and it can be difficult finding good Mac support people who are also willing and able to support the PC.

Another side of this issue which I’ve become more sensitive lately is the perception that IT hates the Mac. I’ll be the first to admit that we have some very entertaining discussions/debates amongst our IT staff regarding the PC vs. Mac battle, but unfortunately some of these debates have spilled over into our discussions with the Creative employees. When I started hearing from Creative that “IT hates the Mac”, I decided it was time to talk to my personnel, and to ask them to be careful what they said. That’s not necessarily an easy thing to ask – it’s a little too much thought control for my liking, but I felt that we needed to be careful about the perception we were creating. The funny thing about this is what the Creative staff isn’t hearing. Those internal IT discussions are just as frequently gripe sessions about Microsoft as they are about Apple, but our Mac users never hear us having those discussions. One of the nice things about having a larger staff of IT people, is that we get an opportunity to discuss these things amongst ourselves. This is one of the things mentioned most frequently when we’ve acquired new offices with existing IT personnel. Typically, these IT people were the only one in their office, and they never had anyone else who truly understood some of the issues we face. Finally being able to discuss some of these things with their peers is a big deal to them.

Obviously there’s more to supporting Creative than just the Mac vs. PC issue. The potential clash between the typical IT personality and the typical Creative personality is probably the single biggest issue, but I’ll leave that one for another day.

The Mac is a Wonderful (and Secure) Platform

I’ve already received one e-mail from a reader pointing me to a blog post refuting the claims of security issues with the Mac . I suppose I should take some consolation in the fact that I’m not getting slammed harder for my first Mac vs. PC post, but I also think the above post helps point out the bigger issue. The argument has become so heated, that sometimes even the good points tend to get lost in the extreme spirit of the debate.

First of all, let me begin by saying that I’m not a security expert. Please refer to my first post for a better understanding of the realities of what I do. At this level of IT, we have to be something of a jack-of-all-trades, and I probably know just enough about security to be dangerous, but the same can probably be said about a lot of specialized IT subject matters. We know enough to get by. In my case, that knowledge has been good enough to get me through 15 years in this job without suffering from any major system outages or downtime to virus outbreaks. I think we’ve done a pretty good job so far, but I’m also not naïve enough to think that any of my systems are invulnerable, and I would never make that claim.

I had misgivings about going “negative” in last week’s post about Mac vs. PC, and in hindsight perhaps the article about the Macbook Air hack deserves greater scrutiny. I’m going to try to avoid this trap in the future. I think there are plenty of positive reasons to choose both platforms. The Mac is undoubtedly a very secure platform, and it’s become even more so in recent versions of OS-X. The fact of the matter is I don’t lose a lot of sleep worrying about my Macs getting hacked. However, is there really anything wrong with pointing out flaws where they do exist, and perhaps letting Apple know that for those of out here in the trenches – security does matter?

Should the negatives come into play in this discussion? Certainly they should. Any time we make a big decision in IT we try to weigh the pros and cons of several options, so the negative factors are something we must consider. The problem with being negative in this discussion is that you’re immediately perceived by the other side to be a “basher”. I can assure you that is not the case with me.

My bigger point in terms of the Mac vs. PC debate is that the argument itself has become too bitter. Case in point being the article at the top of this post – the writer is obviously a big fan of the Mac platform, and I certainly have no issue with anyone having that opinion. However, when you start writing about the “prejudices of an idiot public” and “Microsoft’s criminal actions against its customers”, you run the risk of losing me. I’m simply not willing to go that far in supporting either platform, and personally I think it’s going too far. I also think it’s too bad, because the article itself makes some genuinely good arguments, but when the author goes over that edge into what I’d call extremism, sometimes those good arguments tend to get lost on me.

There are some things I would like to see both Microsoft and Apple do differently. For now, out of fear of inciting either group I’ll avoid those topics. I will save them for a rainy day, because I do think those topics are worthy of discussion.

I’ll say it again. I have plenty of good reasons for purchasing Macs. I have plenty of good reasons for purchasing PCs. Perhaps outlining those reasons would make good topics for my next couple of posts.