Give me an educated guess...

[DaYCEnt]

Aside from my home business, I work for a large call center for Customer support. I manage the 'internet' division, to keep it simple. My hands-on experience with the Mac just started a few short months ago, so i'm a bit ignorant to the full spectrum outlook of Apple and it's products. i'm making a major push for transition to apples for my division as a test group for the whole company (25 stations foe me, 3000 for company), but i'm not going to guns until Leopard.

Any ideas on what the windows interface may turn to? ideas, guesses, wild shots in the dark are all welcome. if i can look these guys dead square in the face and say "we can run those windows programs through a near-seamless (parallels coherence or other VM software) interface, but give our agents the increased productivity designed into the apple systems, it would be more than worth the small cost to replace the desktops," that's what i'm aiming for.

 

[fleurya]

It's getting pretty close to the point where anything can be done through Parallels/VM. I don't know about business applications, but one of the biggest issues facing consumers is running 3D graphics for gaming for example. But that's already being overcome. VMware Fusion is in a beta phase and can run 3D up to DirectX 8 I think. Parallels won't be far behind. I'm actually hoping they'll have it running pretty much everything by the next major release.

What's your budget for spending? The bad thing about virtual machines is they need faster hardware. I've found I need 2GB RAM to run XP in Parallels well enough to match it running natively with 512MB RAM. And if you plan to use Vista, it will be worse. You would have to justify the extra spending on that over machines that are much cheaper because the hardware requirements aren't as high.

 

[Village Idiot]

Aside from my home business, I work for a large call center for Customer support. I manage the 'internet' division, to keep it simple. My hands-on experience with the Mac just started a few short months ago, so i'm a bit ignorant to the full spectrum outlook of Apple and it's products. i'm making a major push for transition to apples for my division as a test group for the whole company (25 stations foe me, 3000 for company), but i'm not going to guns until Leopard.

Any ideas on what the windows interface may turn to? ideas, guesses, wild shots in the dark are all welcome. if i can look these guys dead square in the face and say "we can run those windows programs through a near-seamless (parallels coherence or other VM software) interface, but give our agents the increased productivity designed into the apple systems, it would be more than worth the small cost to replace the desktops," that's what i'm aiming for.

How much have you thought about this?

First of all, small cost to replace the desktops? Are you shooting for iMacs for everyone or MBP, which is traditionally used in the business environment? If you're shooting for just iMacs, you'll probably spend atleast $1500 a piece, and for just the hardware, you're looking at $37,500 for just 25. Also, if you're running a large company and currently using windows, what server software are you using? If you're using Server 2k3, you'll have to purchase and configure new sever software and migrate everything over. If you're going to attempt to do this for the whole company, the cost could end up being as much as the company itself is worth. And not to mention, most companies want a warranty with the support group for which ever company you go with. I forget how much Dell was charging us for gold. I think it was quite a few thousand a year. Does Apple have something like this? You don't want to have anything happen to a computer and take a week to get it replaced with just the normal warranty. With Dell's service, we would have the part either the day we called or next day and a tech to install it if we needed. These are all MAJOR things you need to think about before trying to impliment the idea...

What's the "internet" division? Are you IT or do you have an IT group. If you have an IT group, I'm sure they won't go for it and the budget is going to have to be huge. If it's not broke, don't fix it.

edit: I don't mean to be a pessimist, but I'm in the IT division at work and I know about how much these things cost and how much a company doesn't want to have to replace all their computers unless they absolutely have to. I mean, we had to have several parts that cost over $50k replaced in one of out servers because the people that bought them 4 or 5 years ago are completely budget minded are more worried about cost vs reliability....which was affecting us down the road. But Dell's support that we paid for took care of it for free. That's something you'll definitely have to check out.

 

[jonnyd]

Flaming though it may be, after maybe 15 years of running Dos/Windows systems, and 5 or so with Macs, I have yet to work out where the 'increased productivity' argument comes from.

If you're selling them OSX, but on the basis they'll be running Windows apps, I can't see any argument for it at all.

 

[DaYCEnt]

and these are all points that I was looking for, coming from people in those fields, as well as the understanding of mac apps and uses. i'm still in that 'infatuation' phase of my new iMac and think the whole world needs one!!
as for 'internet', we are a credit card acquirer that processes the swipes for merchants. I manage the software and wireless side of that, or more precisely the customer support and troubleshooting for those areas.
just wishful thinking. my personal business will be based on the mac though.

 

[jonnyd]

and these are all points that I was looking for, coming from people in those fields, as well as the understanding of mac apps and uses. i'm still in that 'infatuation' phase of my new iMac and think the whole world needs one!!
as for 'internet', we are a credit card acquirer that processes the swipes for merchants. I manage the software and wireless side of that, or more precisely the customer support and troubleshooting for those areas.
just wishful thinking. my personal business will be based on the mac though.

Probably more realistic.

I have had ' debates' about this before, but in my experience it's not actually very practical to integrate Macs into an existing Windows network - I used a G5 for a while on our network at Work (Win2k server), and while I could get most things going, there were some that wouldn't - it was at the time pretty much impossible to configure the Mac to run correctly through an ISA firewall - I could get html traffic going OK, but things like OSX updates and other wierd protocols defeated me. I took it out after a couple of weeks and reverted to Windows.

Unless you're going to scrap everything and go with Mac from top to bottom, you'll get no advantage, and you'll end up supporting 2 completely different sets of users. Can't see it justifying the cost.

My brother is IT director for a publishing group, witha around 3,500 stations on a wan. They used to run mostly Macs up to about 5 years ago. They started moving over to Windows for cost reasons (as traditional 'mac only' apps became available for other platforms), and now don't use Macs at all.

He says the transition, when they had to support both types was a nightmare - his costs were way over what they would have been with a sinlge OS, as he had to have Windows AND Mac support staff.

Course, now they could have Intel Macs, but as simple workstations they're far too expensive - it's true to say that a Mac pro and a high spec PC aren't so different in price, but 90% of the stations on any Windows network aren't high end. An Intel Mac starts at what - $1k? There's nothing cheaper. You can get a low spec Dell for half that, which is all you need for most office based operations.