Mac Manager: Mac Manager; Are we "trending up"? Mac managers report a warm front ahead

MacWeek, March 2, 1998 by Don Crabb

This past week I started getting the weirdest feeling, and I'm pretty sure it

wasn't the result of something I ate, drank or inhaled. Instead, this strange

sensation resulted from a spate of e-mail from other Mac managers and Mac

developers. Not that I don't get a lot of e-mail from Mac managers to begin

with, but this week's batch was unusual: It contained success stories - tales

of small victories in the war against the wholesale removal of Macintoshes

from the workplace.

It smells like victory

Let me share just a few of these stories so you'll know what I'm talking

about.

"Apple is delivering to developers," one correspondent proclaims. "I spent

hundreds of dollars on the Inside Macintosh volumes a couple of years ago, and

now I just downloaded the latest version free. Macintosh Programmers Workshop

is free for download. Finally, Apple just released MacApp for free download.

... This is just a sample of what Apple is doing for small developers."

Another corporate developer chimes in, "It's this unpublicized but newfound

support for developers that has turned the corner in my company for Apple. The

dump-Mac crowd has, for the first time in months, shut the hell up."

Score one for Apple. By cutting the cost of development tools, the company is

making it easier for Mac managers to justify the continued presence of Macs at

their businesses - even to corporate IS types.

But wait! There's more

"You know, Don," writes another Mac manager at a Fortune 100 company, "none of

my bosses paid any attention when I told them that the new G3-based Power Macs

were better buys - on a strict performance basis - than comparable Pentium II

iron from Dell or Compaq. But then I managed to get Apple to give us a G3

minitower for side-by-side comparisons between Office 97 running on Windows NT

and Office 98 on Mac OS; that won the day.

"Our company was planning on dumping more than 2,000 administrative Macs and

replacing them with Dell or Compaq P2s over the next six months," the manager

writes. "But now, we're replacing our older Power Macs with G3 models."

The trend

Apple's certainly not out of the woods yet. No rational Mac manager could

believe that, no matter what he's eaten, drunk or inhaled. But Mac managers at

a number of companies are seeing the first crack in an anti-Macintosh wall of

ignorance. After all, many of their chief information officer and IS manager

bosses are no more interested in Windows NT than in any other OS. What they

are interested in is reliable results: equipment and technologies that deliver

value instead of forcing them into "Well, here's why it didn't work"

explanations further up the corporate food chain.

And some of these CIOs and IS managers, when confronted with the facts of the

"case for Macintosh," are coming to realize that the Mac OS is not the

two-headed freak they once thought it was.

Don Crabb welcomes nice, thoughtful comments at don@doncrabb.com. You can also

check out his Web page at http://www.doncrabb.com. Nasty, mean-spirited

comments may be sent to null@bitbucket.com.