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I find myself agreeing with their recommendation, even though I disagree with their rationale. Agreeing to let "HEROES" use Macs in an enterprise (and dear god

I find myself agreeing with their recommendation, even though I disagree with their rationale. Agreeing to let "HEROES" use Macs in an enterprise (and dear god what a terrible term, as if us Mac users weren't smug enough) seems to be basically capitulating to entitlement. At my last company, when Mac OS X first shipped, I wanted to try it out, so I bought an iBook (the cheapest entry to the world of Macs, in case I ended up not liking it). People in my office were horrified, and I was forbidden from attaching it to our network (lest its cooties infect our other systems). Over the course of about 6 months, I was eventually allowed to connect it. I had a coworker who continuously ran a vulnerability scanner against it, telling me that if it ever found anything, I'd have to remove it from the network forever (the handful of unpatched Windows boxes on the network weren't a concern, apparently). Within a year, there were four or five other Macs in my group. Within two years, every single person had one. At my current job, after complaining for two years about how awful my P.O.S. Dell laptop was I got an email from my boss about a month ago. It said "We're getting you a new laptop. Do you want a Thinkpad T520 or a Macbook Pro?". I thought he was messing with me at first, but no, it turns out Macs were now OK for us to use as testing laptops. I will say that in 11 years of going on-site to clients to do security assessments, I have only once encountered a company that had a non-trivial amount of Macs on their network. Over the years, I'd run into a graphic arts department here or there that had a few Macs, but in general, they were a rounding error for the large enterprise clients I deal with.

famousactress 15y ago
...seems to be basically capitulating to entitlement Entitlement to use choose your own tools? Gasp. I think the underlying point the article's taking glancing blows at has plenty of merit, they just failed to do it bluntly enough. I think there's likely a high correlation between highly productive employees, and people who could care less about IT bureaucracy. I don't think it has anything to do with Mac users.. it's just that Windows users in this position are less affected, and through this lens.. less visible.
- m0nastic 15y ago
  Entitlement that the rules put in place don't apply to you, because you are some sort of prima-donna superstar. I find that worrisome. It can bloom into pretty ugly (and moderately damaging) behavior. I've worked for clients who have certain divisions which are the super-stars. I think the better approach is to evaluate why you have all these policies, and if they are actually doing what you think they're doing. edit: Rereading this makes it sound like I'm calling the parent a prima-donna, which isn't what I mean (I'm referring to the people within an enterprise who decide that because they feel more productive on a Mac, they can just bring one in from home to do their work and circumvent all of the policies of IT.) At the risk of forcing a square metaphor into a round analogy, it's really important in the Army that people follow orders. Even if a small group of them think they can be totally more productive by doing things their own way. Enterprises aren't really set up to optimize for increased employee productivity, they're more likely to be set up to limit decreased productivity. I think this is one reason that people seem to like working at a startup, because you get to not have all that dogmatic bureaucracy. If these HEROES in four or five years now suddenly decide that they'd be even more productive if they lugged in SGI O2 workstations from home to do their work, an enterprise has to be able to say "yeah, sorry, you can't do that." But as to more Macs being deployed in enterprises, I'm all for it. It'd give me new things to break into.
  - famousactress 15y ago
    No worries about it sounding like the prima-donna comment was aimed at me. I've certainly fallen into the category of people you've applied it to. At this point I'm sure I'm not remotely fit for The Enterprise, though I've worked in plenty of them. It's not that I've ever thought that the rules put in place don't apply to me.. it's that I've placed a higher priority on other objectives of the company (like getting work done). IT policy at most corporations I've worked at is completely inarguable. In my experience it's very difficult to get a reasonable accounting of cost/benefit when it comes to making almost any change in policy... in part because productivity benefits like the ones I feel I get from my choice of tools are hard to measure, and in part because I don't think I've had the experience of working anyplace where the IT department charged themselves with making other people's jobs easier/better. I think job function matters too. Programming is a craft. Good craftspeople are ridiculously passionate about their tools. If you walk into a nice auto-mechanic shop, the racks of tools against the wall are owned and paid for by the mechanics. I imagine that's not the case at the Jiffy-Lube, but you're we're probably talking about people at a different skill level. Good craftspeople in any industry end up in a relationship that's closer to independent contractor, or even peer with the organization they work for. That's happening in our industry, and I think it makes sense to look at functions that provide friction for those people, because it will become much harder to hire them.
sudont 15y ago
As someone currently doing a "pilot" of a Mac in a highly corporate environment, I can say it's not exactly just IT. There's realms and realms of support groups that get to sign off on "authorized" network equipment, and when you bypass them it's the equivalent to a histamine reaction. I never met anyone in IT who disliked Macs completely and totally, just management. We had one specific storage group that "only supported Windows," despite the storage pool being a Samba process on Linux and all of the core devs using Macs (they had shell account access, so never encountered this). The dev who supported the share outright refused to add the "unix extensions = no" to the smb.conf file (that fun bug). Right now I actually run a little CentOS VM to mount the share with the "nounix" option, then SCP in. So, even once you get the platform, it can be a major struggle to have other groups support it.
- ericd 15y ago
  Wow, with attitudes like that to deal with, it's a wonder anyone can get any real work done there... I can't imagine having to jump through all those hoops just to mount a drive.
trout 15y ago
I work at a large tech company, and we've embraced macs for the last 2 years or so. The macs are still more expensive than the standard company issue, but they are able to offset the cost by offering 0 IT mac support. If you're wanting to go off the beaten path, fix your own issues. There are internal wiki's where the mac enthusiasts pour time into other people's issues, and a general word-of-mouth troubleshooting culture. From the context of the conversations I've heard, I think the major hurdles are around security, support, and hardware costs. Before I'm jumped for implying less security with macs, it's still centered around the ability for the enterprise to control virus scanners, DLP, workgroup rights, generic company control, etc. Whether the operating system is more/less secure is still a religious argument - my guess is more IT staffs consider it less secure however. Which leads to an interesting question - since the user experience has lead to a large enterprise install base, when does Apple start prioritizing business needs? Admittedly I'm not an apple user, but I haven't seen any indication that's it's even on a list. I imagine I'm incorrect.
- yardie 15y ago
  I work in a small enterprise and Macs have slowly taken over and especially now that Macbook Air is out the mobile users are almost exclusively Macs. Some of the things we found were Virus scanners didn't really work on Macs. They predominantly scanned Word documents for virus macros so we dropped that requirement and pushed scanning onto the network. I guess workgroup rights work for us. We aren't very large so having lots of hierarchical rights doesn't make sense. One of our founders still hates OSX but found the Macbook Pro to be well designed, so he's gotten that far. Security is a bit of a strange one. We have some clients where we can only access their network using a cardkey or thumb scanner. I still haven't figured out how to do this on a Mac. Apple used to go after the Enterprise market in the early aughts but I think Jobs just didn't care about it. Preferring the consumer and education markets instead. I don't blame them, if you look at Microsoft they were keeping a dead browser going because enterprise clients kept throwing money at them to support. To me, some enterprise software is just badly written and since the company has a lot of money tied up in using and supporting it they want their vendors to also support it. This is something, I doubt, Apple is willing to do.

famousactress 15y ago

...seems to be basically capitulating to entitlement Entitlement to use choose your own tools? Gasp. I think the underlying point the article's taking glancing blows at has plenty of merit, they just failed to do it bluntly enough. I think there's likely a high correlation between highly productive employees, and people who could care less about IT bureaucracy. I don't think it has anything to do with Mac users.. it's just that Windows users in this position are less affected, and through this lens.. less visible.

m0nastic 15y ago
Entitlement that the rules put in place don't apply to you, because you are some sort of prima-donna superstar. I find that worrisome. It can bloom into pretty ugly (and moderately damaging) behavior. I've worked for clients who have certain divisions which are the super-stars. I think the better approach is to evaluate why you have all these policies, and if they are actually doing what you think they're doing. edit: Rereading this makes it sound like I'm calling the parent a prima-donna, which isn't what I mean (I'm referring to the people within an enterprise who decide that because they feel more productive on a Mac, they can just bring one in from home to do their work and circumvent all of the policies of IT.) At the risk of forcing a square metaphor into a round analogy, it's really important in the Army that people follow orders. Even if a small group of them think they can be totally more productive by doing things their own way. Enterprises aren't really set up to optimize for increased employee productivity, they're more likely to be set up to limit decreased productivity. I think this is one reason that people seem to like working at a startup, because you get to not have all that dogmatic bureaucracy. If these HEROES in four or five years now suddenly decide that they'd be even more productive if they lugged in SGI O2 workstations from home to do their work, an enterprise has to be able to say "yeah, sorry, you can't do that." But as to more Macs being deployed in enterprises, I'm all for it. It'd give me new things to break into.
- famousactress 15y ago
  No worries about it sounding like the prima-donna comment was aimed at me. I've certainly fallen into the category of people you've applied it to. At this point I'm sure I'm not remotely fit for The Enterprise, though I've worked in plenty of them. It's not that I've ever thought that the rules put in place don't apply to me.. it's that I've placed a higher priority on other objectives of the company (like getting work done). IT policy at most corporations I've worked at is completely inarguable. In my experience it's very difficult to get a reasonable accounting of cost/benefit when it comes to making almost any change in policy... in part because productivity benefits like the ones I feel I get from my choice of tools are hard to measure, and in part because I don't think I've had the experience of working anyplace where the IT department charged themselves with making other people's jobs easier/better. I think job function matters too. Programming is a craft. Good craftspeople are ridiculously passionate about their tools. If you walk into a nice auto-mechanic shop, the racks of tools against the wall are owned and paid for by the mechanics. I imagine that's not the case at the Jiffy-Lube, but you're we're probably talking about people at a different skill level. Good craftspeople in any industry end up in a relationship that's closer to independent contractor, or even peer with the organization they work for. That's happening in our industry, and I think it makes sense to look at functions that provide friction for those people, because it will become much harder to hire them.

sudont 15y ago

As someone currently doing a "pilot" of a Mac in a highly corporate environment, I can say it's not exactly just IT. There's realms and realms of support groups that get to sign off on "authorized" network equipment, and when you bypass them it's the equivalent to a histamine reaction. I never met anyone in IT who disliked Macs completely and totally, just management. We had one specific storage group that "only supported Windows," despite the storage pool being a Samba process on Linux and all of the core devs using Macs (they had shell account access, so never encountered this). The dev who supported the share outright refused to add the "unix extensions = no" to the smb.conf file (that fun bug). Right now I actually run a little CentOS VM to mount the share with the "nounix" option, then SCP in. So, even once you get the platform, it can be a major struggle to have other groups support it.

ericd 15y ago
Wow, with attitudes like that to deal with, it's a wonder anyone can get any real work done there... I can't imagine having to jump through all those hoops just to mount a drive.

trout 15y ago

I work at a large tech company, and we've embraced macs for the last 2 years or so. The macs are still more expensive than the standard company issue, but they are able to offset the cost by offering 0 IT mac support. If you're wanting to go off the beaten path, fix your own issues. There are internal wiki's where the mac enthusiasts pour time into other people's issues, and a general word-of-mouth troubleshooting culture. From the context of the conversations I've heard, I think the major hurdles are around security, support, and hardware costs. Before I'm jumped for implying less security with macs, it's still centered around the ability for the enterprise to control virus scanners, DLP, workgroup rights, generic company control, etc. Whether the operating system is more/less secure is still a religious argument - my guess is more IT staffs consider it less secure however. Which leads to an interesting question - since the user experience has lead to a large enterprise install base, when does Apple start prioritizing business needs? Admittedly I'm not an apple user, but I haven't seen any indication that's it's even on a list. I imagine I'm incorrect.

yardie 15y ago
I work in a small enterprise and Macs have slowly taken over and especially now that Macbook Air is out the mobile users are almost exclusively Macs. Some of the things we found were Virus scanners didn't really work on Macs. They predominantly scanned Word documents for virus macros so we dropped that requirement and pushed scanning onto the network. I guess workgroup rights work for us. We aren't very large so having lots of hierarchical rights doesn't make sense. One of our founders still hates OSX but found the Macbook Pro to be well designed, so he's gotten that far. Security is a bit of a strange one. We have some clients where we can only access their network using a cardkey or thumb scanner. I still haven't figured out how to do this on a Mac. Apple used to go after the Enterprise market in the early aughts but I think Jobs just didn't care about it. Preferring the consumer and education markets instead. I don't blame them, if you look at Microsoft they were keeping a dead browser going because enterprise clients kept throwing money at them to support. To me, some enterprise software is just badly written and since the company has a lot of money tied up in using and supporting it they want their vendors to also support it. This is something, I doubt, Apple is willing to do.