Folks

Network World Magazine

Hey, I got quoted in Network World magazine. :-)

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/022707-mac-os-going-corporate.html

The title of the article is "Mac OS being infused with the tools of the corporate IT trade, but can it catch on?" The gist of the article is that the Mac is ready, but a lot of IT shops haven't properly evaluated it yet. I got the last tagline as well, "'I guess I still don’t see Mac having crossed the awareness gap,' says ps Enable’s Suh. 'It has started to seep into IT consciousness, but there is still a lot of prejudice out there, with some saying Mac is not ready for prime time. Until that awareness gap is closed, then everything else is secondary.'”

The Canard of the Single-Source Argument

canard
1 an unfounded rumor or story : the old canard that LA is a cultural wasteland.
...
ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from French, literally ‘duck,’ also ‘hoax,’ from Old French caner ‘to quack.’

Now that the Mac is being seriously considered by enterprise customers, the old single-source canard has been raised by a few "analysts" (most of whom as far as I can tell have never analyzed anything, instead just spewing the words of others). It runs something like this: "Since the Mac is produced only by Apple, if you don't like Apple or Apple treats you badly or you don't like the price, you can't go somewhere else for your systems. On the Windows platform, you can go to HP or Dell or IBM and get compatible equipment if your current vendor treats you badly."

Bull. What a load of. Complete nonsense. Sewage best dealt with by flushing down the toilet.

Why? There are two parts that need to be addressed: the part that is common across the various vendors and the part that is specific to each vendor.

First, the part that is common to each vendor — Windows. If there is some part of Windows that you don't like, you have two choices. One is to buy into an open source solution such as Linux or FreeBSD, which has its own costs. The other is to switch to the Mac. If Windows is a problem then switching from IBM to Dell is not going to solve anything. Not technical issues and not license pricing issues either. Any license pricing that you can get from one you can get from the other, since it is all dictated by Microsoft anyway.

Second, the part that is specific to each vendor — the hardware and the hardware support. The single source canard has a hidden assumption — that you can replace all of a disliked vendor's hardware at once. Not going to happen. Never. Not at the enterprise scale, anyway. Different chipsets have different driver requirements. The lights-out management systems are just a little bit different between vendors, and between different models from the same vendor. Stuff will get stomped on or stop working in the face of system updates or service packs or security patches. Once that happens you're going to have to fix up your deployment images and in-place systems. To do this, you will need to continue to deal with the old company's support. Only now, since you're no longer buying any new hardware from them, you're at the back of the line as far as their account reps are concerned. Lotsa luck, chief.

So, any time that someone raises the, "but if I buy from Apple I'm stuck with a single source" argument, ask them what considerations exist when they want to switch to a different vendor with non-Apple equipment.

Subscribing to This Newsletter

I've updated my website so that you can subscribe to this newsletter from the website. I put a link on the front page and also at the top of the newsletter page. If you have friends or colleagues who want to sign up as well, please have them go to:

http://lists.ps-enable.com/mailman/listinfo/newsletter

Again, please let me know if you like the articles or have a topic that you would like me to cover.

Macs on a Train

You've heard of Snakes on a Plane, right? Well how about Macs on a Train? I took Amtrak up to New York City a couple of weeks ago, and on the way back I noticed that every single open laptop in my car (which was about 3/4 full) was a Mac! Even in the other cars, there were at least one or two Macs among the Windows laptops that people were using. And, it wasn't just students or leisure travelers -- the people using the Macs were dressed in business suits, not jeans.

Defeating Hardware Rootkit Detection

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=109

Be afraid. Be very afraid. This is a really neat trick to defeat PCi- or FireWire-based RAM snapshot utilities by hacking the RAM controller on the motherboard. It just goes to show that you absolutely cannot check the security on a computer system while it is running. My hat is off to Ms. Rutkowska for this very excellent hack. It's worth going through her presentation slides from the link at the bottom of the article.

--Paul