IT Productivity

I meant to reply to his article on this in the "Baloney!"
section but it has been closed for repairs until the
"come up with something new."

For the most part, I agree with him. I personally think it
would be cool to replace a lot of our windows boxen
with Macs at work. It would put a lot of "fun" back in work
which hasn't been there in a long while.

However, in one of his points, he states that:

"It takes just as many nerds to support 100 Linux boxes as
100 Windows boxes, yet Linux boxes are cheaper and can
support more users."

Umm...It usually takes FAR more nerds to look after
Windows boxes than it does for Linux (Unix) boxes.
And, likewise, if a given Linux (Unix) box supports more
users than a windows server, you need FEWER boxes to
support the same number of users. Fewer boxes means
fewer required support staff which just shoots a hole in
his entire premise that Macs aren't permitted in the IT
departments because they are covering their butts. I don't
buy it.

There are many reasons that Macs aren't brought into
IT depts. But that ain't one of them.

John Gruber:

If you believe computing is inordinately and/or inherently more complicated than plumbing, you need to put aside your blue-vs.-white collar prejudices and think about the engineering involved. It seems easier to me to deliver the bytes of an email message from the 82nd floor of the Empire State Building than it does to empty the waste from one of its toilets.

It’s all about expectations. We, as a society, have decided that indoor plumbing should be held to high standards of reliability and maintenance. And somehow we’ve been convinced that indoor computing should not.

Here's a follow-up from Gruber.