RSSAre Macs a no-brainer on TCO?
TCO case studies often cause me to break out in hives and although I recognize and even encourage the use of such metrics amongst clients, I have a lot of trouble crediting the generalizations that are trumpeted from the hills every time a new study comes out contradicting some previous study and crowning a victor in the TCO wars.
So I am skeptical of the global application of the results of a new Enterprise Desktop Alliance survey showing that Macs have a better TCO case in mixed environments, even though it both tracks with my personal experience and with the basic logic I ascribe to TCO calculations.
David Morgenstern at ZDNet has an interesting post breaking down the results and looking at some of the implications, including an increasing level of support for Apple products by other major enterprise vendors.
That increased level of support goes some way to assuage my own reservations about Macs in enterprise environments, which have long been grounded in Apple's extraordinarily poor support for business users. The culture of a consumer-oriented company, I have argued, simply doesn't lend itself to providing the level of support the modern enterprise market demands. That concern is quite apart from the failure of third-party application and hardware vendors to support the platform as a whole; the fact remains that any large installation of any sort of computer system is going to uncover problems of some sort, and how the company providing the systems responds may ultimately be more important than the systems themselves.
This survey, and my own predilection toward minimizing the support function for in-house users by adopting fragile support models that emphasize interoperability of corporate systems and personal choices and responsibility for individual systems, may be cause to reconsider the weight of that factor. If, at some point, the rate of error becomes sufficiently low, then maybe it is worth discounting the level of support available. In 14% of the organizations surveyed, there was no corporate support provided for Macs. That should be a CIO's wet dream, to say nothing of the CFO. Support is a tremendous cost center and factors heavily in TCO calculations no matter where you are. Eliminating it entirely is a huge win. Morgenstern seems to think that there will be massive resistance to increasing the number of Macs in the enterprise, saying "IT managers will have to deal," but while that may be true at the ground level where biases against the new and unfamiliar are strong, as long as the numbers continue to pan out the decision makers will be clamoring for them.
