5 ms·

Enterprise IT as in systems for end users (you can call it Commercial IT). The IT guys themselves will not use Win 8 Pro / Surface of course. Just the business

Enterprise IT as in systems for end users (you can call it Commercial IT). The IT guys themselves will not use Win 8 Pro / Surface of course. Just the business users. But Enterprise IT departments make the purchasing decisions. It all depends on scale. Once you have 50k employees worldwide, Ubuntu does not cut it. OS X might, but no one has tried so far. MS Office is the killer here, if you can't run it, you're dead. That's why MS was caught so surprised when the iPad took off, against all logic.

tluyben2 14y ago
Yes, that makes sense. I was thrown of by 'IT guys'. But in 50k employees worldwide corps in the EU at least I see a lot of business guys doing a lot of their work on iPads and Macbooks now. Anecdotal: a few business friends of mine working for energy and pharma now make their presentations on the iPad directly in Keynote and present it from the iPad. They don't touch PPT anymore. The Windows machine (or Macbook) only switches on for Word (hardly ever) or Excel.
- meaty 14y ago
  Same with finance sector. Everyone has iPads. We spent the majority of the last year optimising our web app so it works nicely on iOS. We're even doing offline apps soon for data collection. People don't even use Excel now - our platform is powerful enough to cover all of the normal use cases in the financial sector.
  - JimmaDaRustla 14y ago
    I work in the financial sector, 80000+ employees. Office, Visio, Project, Active Directory, SQL Server, Server, etc. all play a huge role in our PC structure and end user environments. We also have massive IBM deployments including MVS and Unix (z/OS, AIX, DB2, Oracle, etc.) that run most all of the back-end banking. Microsoft in the front-end, IBM/Unix in the back. Gotta say, the front end, although more complicated, is more easily managed and deployed. I could never see a replacement for it, not yet anyway. Edit: No, iPads won't play nicely with this setup.
    - meaty 14y ago
      Our guys are mainly in the field so its probably a different model.
Ntrails 14y ago
Windows 7 is perfectly suited as an enterprise solution. Based on how many companies still use XP - I think we've got a good 10 more years of use from win 7. Once it is no longer tenable to use it, you'd better hope microsoft have developed a usable windows version for offices, because I don't think live tiles updating me on my social network is exactly a selling point in an enterprise solution...
flagnog 14y ago
"Once you have 50k employees worldwide, Ubuntu does not cut it" - yep, it costs too much. No... wait, it's free. There's no deployment tools... no... wait, there are... There's no good office softw... nevermind. No one has ever... wait, there's that town in Germany. I give up. Why isn't Ubuntu suitable? It even comes with an RDP client so you can use Windows-only programs remotely...
- TheCondor 14y ago
  Arguably management tools for all those devices, but that is very rapidly changing. The real reason is that no body has done it and said "this is how you do it" and not that many IT guys are in a position to decide to try it and take the risk. The only technical reason would be custom apps built for window or .net, otherwise all of the pieces are there to do it for most businesses.
- tluyben2 14y ago
  This is hearsay but what I understood is that there is no suitable large scale alternative for MS Active Directory and that it doesn't play well with Linux setups as it does with Windows. I didn't see this mentioned, so I thought I would, maybe someone with more experience in this kind of management can chime in.
  - flagnog 14y ago
    from personal experience it is a bit harder (or was, last time I checked) to manage file permissions vs Windows. As far as AD, Linux has had LDAP (which AD is based on) for quite a while.
- bjustin 14y ago
  LibreOffice/OpenOffice doesn't work as well as MS Office. Google Docs doesn't replicate all of the functionality that MS Office offers, and doesn't work as well. The productivity difference[1] would easily be worth over $200/person/month for people who use Office a lot. [1] From features that Google Docs and to a lesser extent, LibreOffice, don't have or work poorly, and speed especially vs Google Docs.
anonymous 14y ago
You have google docs on the ipad, in fact on anything with an internet connection, which let you import/export office files.
- xradionut 14y ago
  Until Google decides to kill it. Or kill the features you find useful...
  - xtracto 14y ago
    This here is the problem with web-based services, and the advantage of Microsoft Office. If Microsoft decides to kill a feature available in Excel 2010, you still can use it. Of course also the difference is that I paid for MS Office while I haven't paid a cent for Google Docs.
    - robotresearcher 14y ago
      | If Microsoft decides to kill a feature available in Excel 2010, you still can use it. Individuals with that version installed can use it, but you can't get new licenses for more employees, and you won't be able to upgrade to get new features. You might also be wary of applying bugfix patches in case your key feature gets zapped. Also, user support for your feature will dry up eventually.
4ad 14y ago
> Once you have 50k employees worldwide, Ubuntu does not cut it. Tell that to Google. > OS X might For LDAP and Kerberos, OS X is much less configurable than Linux and the number of tools is less. So if Linux is not good enough, how could OS X even stand a chance? Because of Office for Mac? It's much worse than the Windows version, many documents are not rendered correctly, VBA works poorly, especially for Excel, Exchange support is not on par with the Windows version, many features are missing and Mac users hate the program.

tluyben2 14y ago

Yes, that makes sense. I was thrown of by 'IT guys'. But in 50k employees worldwide corps in the EU at least I see a lot of business guys doing a lot of their work on iPads and Macbooks now. Anecdotal: a few business friends of mine working for energy and pharma now make their presentations on the iPad directly in Keynote and present it from the iPad. They don't touch PPT anymore. The Windows machine (or Macbook) only switches on for Word (hardly ever) or Excel.

meaty 14y ago
Same with finance sector. Everyone has iPads. We spent the majority of the last year optimising our web app so it works nicely on iOS. We're even doing offline apps soon for data collection. People don't even use Excel now - our platform is powerful enough to cover all of the normal use cases in the financial sector.
- JimmaDaRustla 14y ago
  I work in the financial sector, 80000+ employees. Office, Visio, Project, Active Directory, SQL Server, Server, etc. all play a huge role in our PC structure and end user environments. We also have massive IBM deployments including MVS and Unix (z/OS, AIX, DB2, Oracle, etc.) that run most all of the back-end banking. Microsoft in the front-end, IBM/Unix in the back. Gotta say, the front end, although more complicated, is more easily managed and deployed. I could never see a replacement for it, not yet anyway. Edit: No, iPads won't play nicely with this setup.
  - meaty 14y ago
    Our guys are mainly in the field so its probably a different model.

Ntrails 14y ago

Windows 7 is perfectly suited as an enterprise solution. Based on how many companies still use XP - I think we've got a good 10 more years of use from win 7. Once it is no longer tenable to use it, you'd better hope microsoft have developed a usable windows version for offices, because I don't think live tiles updating me on my social network is exactly a selling point in an enterprise solution...

flagnog 14y ago

"Once you have 50k employees worldwide, Ubuntu does not cut it" - yep, it costs too much. No... wait, it's free. There's no deployment tools... no... wait, there are... There's no good office softw... nevermind. No one has ever... wait, there's that town in Germany. I give up. Why isn't Ubuntu suitable? It even comes with an RDP client so you can use Windows-only programs remotely...

TheCondor 14y ago
Arguably management tools for all those devices, but that is very rapidly changing. The real reason is that no body has done it and said "this is how you do it" and not that many IT guys are in a position to decide to try it and take the risk. The only technical reason would be custom apps built for window or .net, otherwise all of the pieces are there to do it for most businesses.
tluyben2 14y ago
This is hearsay but what I understood is that there is no suitable large scale alternative for MS Active Directory and that it doesn't play well with Linux setups as it does with Windows. I didn't see this mentioned, so I thought I would, maybe someone with more experience in this kind of management can chime in.
- flagnog 14y ago
  from personal experience it is a bit harder (or was, last time I checked) to manage file permissions vs Windows. As far as AD, Linux has had LDAP (which AD is based on) for quite a while.
bjustin 14y ago
LibreOffice/OpenOffice doesn't work as well as MS Office. Google Docs doesn't replicate all of the functionality that MS Office offers, and doesn't work as well. The productivity difference[1] would easily be worth over $200/person/month for people who use Office a lot. [1] From features that Google Docs and to a lesser extent, LibreOffice, don't have or work poorly, and speed especially vs Google Docs.

anonymous 14y ago

You have google docs on the ipad, in fact on anything with an internet connection, which let you import/export office files.

xradionut 14y ago
Until Google decides to kill it. Or kill the features you find useful...
- xtracto 14y ago
  This here is the problem with web-based services, and the advantage of Microsoft Office. If Microsoft decides to kill a feature available in Excel 2010, you still can use it. Of course also the difference is that I paid for MS Office while I haven't paid a cent for Google Docs.
  - robotresearcher 14y ago
    | If Microsoft decides to kill a feature available in Excel 2010, you still can use it. Individuals with that version installed can use it, but you can't get new licenses for more employees, and you won't be able to upgrade to get new features. You might also be wary of applying bugfix patches in case your key feature gets zapped. Also, user support for your feature will dry up eventually.

4ad 14y ago

> Once you have 50k employees worldwide, Ubuntu does not cut it. Tell that to Google. > OS X might For LDAP and Kerberos, OS X is much less configurable than Linux and the number of tools is less. So if Linux is not good enough, how could OS X even stand a chance? Because of Office for Mac? It's much worse than the Windows version, many documents are not rendered correctly, VBA works poorly, especially for Excel, Exchange support is not on par with the Windows version, many features are missing and Mac users hate the program.