Apple users hit back over "irrelevant" claim

Apple users and fans have angrily hit back at claims by top IT bosses in this week's silicon.com CIO Jury that Apple is largely "irrelevant" to their corporate IT strategies.

While some of the reader feedback was just plain abusive vitriol, we've collected together the best of the more considered responses arguing against the CIO claims.

One of the main arguments was that IT directors and CIOs have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, which in the case of most large corporates tends to be a Wintel platform.

silicon.com reader Jeff Lebowski from the US said: "Senior managers don't choose the best products, they choose the 'safe' products. You'll never get fired or demoted for choosing Microsoft solutions regardless of how insecure, buggy and high maintenance they become."

Another reader suggested market forces will push Apple into the business arena: "Those companies that can cut costs in IT will move ahead of those who doggedly stay with their old technology. It happened with IBM in the 1970s and it is happening now with open source. The Macs are Linux with training wheels. Training is a cost, and needs to be factored into the overall total cost of ownership."

On a more specific level, Randal Bahner, a small business convert from Microsoft to Apple, disagreed with the CIO Jury's assertions based on his switch two years ago.

"My introduction to Mac OS X was met with some scepticism but after over a year of working with Mac OS X Server, I would not say it is 'irrelevant' to businesses. I have enjoyed using their front-end interface and yet can still pop in to the Terminal and get 'greasy'. I don't know, may be its just me, but I find it much easier to administer and plan to dump my Windows stuff totally and replace it with OS X Server," he said.

London-based company director Timothy Barnes added that his consulting company now runs Macs.

"We have no problems integrating with the companies that are our clients, finding the right software or connecting to corporate networks. The overall cost of ownership is far lower given the low training requirements, better security and higher user productivity," he said.

But among the masses of pro-Apple reader comments there were still a few readers who sided with the CIOs' assertion that Apple isn't important for corporate IT departments.

Nick Clark, an IT director from London, said: "The Mac platform is a real pain to tie down in any decent sized network with multiple users. They are still overpriced compared to equivalent PCs from manufacturers such as Dell, and cost even more to support. This is from the perspective of an educational establishment with 1,100 PCs and 120 Macs, so it is informed."

Another London-based developer responding to a post calling the CIOs an "uninformed bunch of pompous fools" said: "Hmmm…10+ guys who are heads of their respective IT organisations or somebody with an 'ology'. Who you gonna believe?"