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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Phillip C. Lee who wrote (9490)	3/15/1998 12:24:00 PM
From: Adam Siegel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213176

I've been reading this board for over a year now, and am finally able to write now that SI has thrown us lurkers a bone with the free membership. I work for a large consulting firm where Windows is dominant both in our own firm and the Fortune 100 clients I have worked at. I recently did a little experiment to see how well a Mac would integrate into our corporate environment. I rented an 8500/150 for a web app development project I was working on claiming I needed it for Photoshop. Fortunately, no one argued. I did install all my graphics apps, but also wanted to see if I could successfuly function on a day to day basis without having to use my Windows laptop. First of all, I noticed that key applications that everyone runs are lagging on the Mac. Lotus Notes client for Mac is buggy, Exchange for Mac is bad, and up until now, the key app, Office, has been bad news. I was able to use Notes, but attachments were problematic. Office documents displayed poorly (except for Excel), but I assume this will be fixed with Office98. And of course any application that was created by our own people (time reporting app, etc.) was done in VB and was never ported to Macs. One real pain was that browsers on the different platforms displayed HTML and ran Javascript code differently, which would be a hastle in a mixed platform Intranet environment. Overall though, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. I got a Novell client so I could share files with the rest of the firm, and was able to create a Mac volume on our NT server to share files with my project team. So I guess the lesson learned here is that it is possible to integrate a mac into a mixed corporate environment as long as you are willing to put up with some quirks here and there. HOpefully the soon to be parity of MSOffice will spur some increased corporate buying of Macs, but I'm not seeing a compelling argument right now to introduce Macs into an environment that is already 100% Windows. It is more likely that Macs can make inroads into places that already have them. Some good news in my travels; Macs still seem to be prevalent in any multimedia installation. In our own lab, we have a full Media100 setup, plus acouple more Macs set up as graphics stations. Also, any design firms we have partnered with have always been Macintosh. And even our own IS guys use Macs as FTP servers, claiming by far they are the most secure of any platform. And of course, whenever I had to do any of my own design work, I always do it at home on my 8500/120 and bring it back to work, never failing to attach a credits page to any of my projects loudly stating all graphics and coding was done on a Mac. :) I get lots of ridicule for being a Mac fanatic, but I could care less. When 3 out of the 8 NT workstations have had to be re-formatted and rebuilt on my project team, and 2 of the others consistently display the NT Screensaver (illegal operation bluescreen) and my Mac rental keeps humming along running MacOS8.1 with no problems, people tend to shut up. Thanks, I've enjoyed reading all your posts... -Adam