The company I work for supports small to medium sized business’ which largely operate with standard Windows client server infrastructure
A large proportion of our business is generated from incidents relating to applications running in a Microsoft environment.
And over time there’s a slowly growing trend. Our clients staff are starting to ask for Macs; Macbooks and Macbook Pros specifically.
This leads us to a question, what do we do with these clients now we have to support their rogue systems?
It’s not feasible to invest in Mac-specific training or resources, there’s just not enough business need to warrant that kind of outlay.
By the same token if we ignore the new laptops we begin to alienate the client.
Often it’s the decision makers who buy Apple machines first . This means the GM’s and CEO’s will be the first to feel a lack of support.
For now the numbers are small enough that the impact is negligible, but this won’t be the case for long.
I’m still new to Macs: the release of Leopard in October was the tipping point, the catalyst being Vista.
Since the days of DOS 5 I’ve been using, and building, and evangelising Microsoft-based machines. They were perfect for what I needed.
When I went to RMIT to study animation and interactive media they introduced me to G3’s and OS 9. I was not impressed.
Having to allocate memory to applications. Frequent freezing. Questionable aesthetic design. Even Photoshop was less stable.
Lightwave and Maya ran better on my homebuilt machine, which was put together on a students budget.
And you couldn’t play games on a Mac, not real ones.
So Microsoft released XP, and eventually with the refinements and patches to stability and security it became a very good operating system.
I was content.
Mac’s had been flitting about the periphery of my sphere of awareness; a friend used them and was passionate, OS X looked … good.
In 2006 Apple switched to Intel and I got my first taste of Windows Vista.
There are few software releases which I’ve felt so violently about. Microsoft had turned about and shat on the chest of it’s users.
Around this time I installed iTunes - finally after years of preferring Winamp I began to appreciate the integration Apple pushed.
iTunes delivered podcasts which in turn led to the TWiT network and Macbreak. This fed the fire which resulted in the purchase of a Macbook.
Switcher101 will be written from the point of view of a certified Microsoft tech trying to make sense of a new way of working.
It will in no way a complete and authoritative reference, but will be updated with corrections or as I find things of interest.
So there are these ideas floating around about podcasts, and websites, and content, but I’m struck by how much time all these things take.
I figure content generation requires 3 things. 1) Subject. 2) Application. 3) Discipline. On the web infrequency is death.
The only way to get content online regularly is to have the method of distribution right there in my pocket. Anything else takes too long.