[MacDoc]

You know Nortel and Motorola were both "Mac houses" in their heyday.
Now both companies are on the skids - low morale, troubled engineering etc.

The Gardner report on productivity basically said that any manager that switched a team from Mac to PC was "in breach of fiduciary duty" - pretty strong words.
The reasoning ( and this was based on 10,000 companies ) was that the drop in completed tasks, loss of morale and LOSS OF KEY STAFF associated with such a change was often devastating. Support costs skyrocketed and ROI plummeted.
Moto switched out of Macs shortly before their ongoing downward spiral began.
Nortel did just before their peak boom and have been in serious decline since.
Of course not everything could be attributed to such a platform switch - the melt down in the Telecom market for instances but I wonder just how "contributory" the switch to the dark side may have been.
I notice that Quebecor ( yep and we used to sell to them ...duh), a primarily Mac house has been doing very well during difficult times - absorbing other companies and generally prospering.
Any other examples??
Thoughts??



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[minnes]

uh Macdod
I think its Quebecor
no e
I used to get printing done by those guys
good work too

 

[Strongblade]

Certainly having experienced the NorTel decline up close & personal (09/2000-05/2001) The amount of tech support needed seemed horrendous.

If you consider that, for more than 100 people in the department I was connected to, and having about 30% Mac Users, We had 2 Mac Techs and 2 PC Techs. The PC Techs were run ragged every day while the Mac Techs (Myself and Neil) were pretty relaxed about the problems we would encounter.

Neil was also on the PC Tech side too, and can tell you that the number of Mac calls were low compared to PC calls. And often a Mac call was related to a problem that was not strictly a Mac problem, such as a printer problem or accessing a PC partition.

NorTel was indeed mostly Macs many, many years ago, and although the switch out happened long before I arrived, if they had kept the Mac platform, their hardware woes for individual employees would have been a whole lot less.

But as fun as it would be to say the switch was the impending downfall, I suspect there was alot more realistic reasons for it.

 

[dthompson101]

Quebecor.....yupm they are a stronghold in the print industry...

They are the worlds largest printer. If you have never seen a sunday press or how your papers and telephone books are made, I invite you to take a tour of one of their plants.

All these plants are Macintosh based. To get a printing press that can produce 65,000 copies/hour, it all comes from and starts from a Mac.
They are a powerhouse of a company and the best thing is they are Canadian!!

WooHoo!!

Companies that switch from the Mac to PC are doomed. People who support Windows are truly stupid. The Toronto School Board used to be mostly mac based...now they are trying to erradicate macs. While it may be a good idea to go to a single platform in a network that size, they are making the wrong decision. Windows requires so much more maintenence than the Mac that the amount of people needed to support those workstations drives up the overall cost of actually implementing them. Cheaper to being with, but more costly in the long run.

Upper Canada College has 350 PCs compared to 230 Macs.

Servers: 7 Windows, 5 Mac Servers
IT techs (MCSE's) - 5
ACTC (Apple Certified Technical Co-ordinators) -1

Cost per tech: 45,000 average

now how is it that a company the has almost the same amount of cpu's can justify the different amount of people to look after the different platforms...

the answer is Windows costs so much more to integrate and maintain, and MCSE's are so insecure about themselves that they will make up excuses as to not use to Macs as any smart person would know it requires less time and effort to look after Macs in the long run!

Don't start telling me about different services and different technologies as they all have the same equivelant for one another....Windows costs more to maintain. Just because you can build a CPU for 500 dollars doesn't mean that it wont cost 4 times as much to maintain it in the long run compared to a Mac!

vive le Mac!

 

[MACSPECTRUM]

What most companies fail to realize in their purchase decisions are "hard" dollar vs. "soft" dollar costs.

Windows machine probably costs less than a Mac but like David T. said what happens to the support costs?

Nobody seems to calculate these into the purchase equation. Certainly not the salesperson!

So the company saves let's say 20% on the units but then have to invest in technical personnel for support, updates, security issues, etc., usually far outweighing the original "savings" of the Windows machines.

The hardware costs are "one time only", but the "support costs" go on ad infinitum.

 

[MACSPECTRUM]

I do hear the sound of thundering hooves getting closer though....

 

[MacNutt]

We agree on this point,as well, Michael. That's twice in less than a week!

Let's try not to make a habit of this....it could mean that the apocalypse is nearer than we thought....

 

[PosterBoy]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by macspectrum:

Nobody seems to calculate these into the purchase equation. Certainly not the salesperson!
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I point it out to every customer that even mentions the Macs in our store. A lot of them dont believe me.

--PB

 

[MacDoc]

Yes every study has said the same thing and a current big one in Australia really made it clear. Other than the dominance of IT departments influence in keeping themselves employed I simply can't understand why the corporate world continues to pay through the nose...over and over and over.
Quebecor should be a model for other firms that are large. I think Time/Warner is also a huge Mac house.
I know NASA used to be - I was nevre sure of the outcome of the OS battle there. I remember some scientists saying they could never have done their projects cost effectively without their Macs.

I certainly agree in Nortels case that there are other factors but one wonders how much "friction" and extra costs the platform change caused.

One distributor in the computer industry did not change platforms but did change their entire ordering and execution system in one big bite and for four months were almost impossible to conduct business with. They went from #1 to number 3 and fading and the consensus is they will never recover.

The same kind of catastrophic change in business operations HAS to occur when a company changes platforms for one with such high maintenance characteristics as Windows has exhibited.
I just wonder if part of the severe downward spiral for both Moto and Nortel could be the same factors at work. Especially the morale factor.

Here is the text of the Melbourne University situation....note the last line in particular.

"Melbourne University counts the savings with Apple

SYDNEY 12 June 2002.

A study from technology research company, Gartner has found Apple Macintosh computers to be up to 36 percent cheaper to own and run than competing PC products. The study utilised Gartner's Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) methodology, which takes into account the direct and indirect costs of owning IT infrastructure. Direct costs include all hardware and software costs for desktop and mobile computers, servers and peripherals as well as upgrades, technical support and annual depreciation. Indirect costs cover the costs of end-users supporting themselves and each other, end-user training time and non-productive downtime.

The report compares the TCO for the University's Mac environment with its PC environment. It also compared the University's Mac environment with similar sized PC installations around the world. The research was conducted at Melbourne University in the Faculty of Arts which included 4676 Apple computers and 5338 Windows based machines. The relevant cost comparisons were $ 14.1 million and $ 18.9 million respectively. Apple systems cost just $ 1953 per year to support, Gartner found, compared with annual costs for Windows based machines of $ 2522.

Apple Computer Marketing Director, Arno Lenior, said the findings illustrated how medium to large sized organisations like Melbourne University could save time and money by investing in Macs over PCs. There is a perception that Macs are more expensive than PCs but this report proves what we've long believed - Macintosh is the most cost effective and efficient platform available, said Marketing Director, Apple Computer, Arno Lenior.

In examining direct costs, Gartner found that Macs required less technical support and the hardware and software costs were lower. Gartner found that this translated into direct savings of 25 percent over similar sized organisations using personal computers. University of Melbourne IT staff were able to manage more Macintosh systems per person servicing 30 Apple computers for every 23.2 Windows based computer. Macs are designed to be easy to use. The report highlighted this, proving that Mac users at the University required less formal training and didn't rely as heavily on technical staff as PC users. When something did go wrong, the technical staff solved the problem faster on Macs than PCs, said Lenior.

The Gartner report found that the Mac's efficiency and ease of use resulted in additional indirect savings of 43 percent. When combined, the Total Cost of Ownership for Melbourne University's Macs was 36 percent lower than similar PC environments elsewhere. Perhaps even more importantly, when questioned on how they felt about their networks Mac users at the University were happier than their PC counterparts."



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[Strongblade]

I was talking with an ex-Nortel colleague on Friday night's regular pub night and one of the topics that came up was NorTel's switching to PCs from Macs.

Now this guy had been with NorTel for more than 20 years. His explanation was that the reason was that Macs just weren't compatible with PCs when the switch happened. They would send off files to clients who couldn't read even the Mac-formatted floppy disks (to give you an idea of the time frame fo the switch). and that the switch to Windows was because all their clients were on Windows.

Well, nowadays, I did explain, it wouldn't be such a problem. But at the time, it was a big deal.

Was the switch a big factor in NorTel's imploding? Not very likely. Basically, Roth & Co. "Bet the Farm" on the Internet and it imploded. They didn't have any bankable cash to fall back on when the dot-com crash occurred and NorTel never recovered.

Although it is nice to think that if NorTel had been predominantly Macs, it would have survived, it's not likely so.

NorTel's collapse can be likened to a star's collapse. NorTel was like our sun. Then, over time, it ballooned out huge (120,000 employees at one point) like a Red Giant star before imploding to a White Dwarf (a mere 35,000 employees). Assets (such as buildings and resources) expanded with the size of employees and are now being shed like those same employees.

NorTel let go 2/3rds of it's staff over the last several years. It's stablized somewhat now, but it's a mere speck of it's former self.

 

[MACSPECTRUM]

posterboy,

i meant the windows salesperson

they guy/girl from some big pc retailer trying to cut a deal with a firm.

i was not speaking of one off retail sales where someone speaks on both sides of the computer fence.

 

[PosterBoy]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by macdoc:
I think Time/Warner is also a huge Mac house.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I don't know about the entire company but every magazine put out by Time Life (An AOL Time Warner Company) is produced on Macs.

--PB

 

[gordguide]

As are most of the PC magazines.

 

[MACSPECTRUM]

any of u remember the story of one of bill gates's presentations and the computer that was displaying the multimedia stuff had to be re-booted and the splash screen said "Welcome to Macintosh"

Urban legend?