B_Skurka said:
I am constantly amazed by the mis-informaiton about Mac's.... The computer guys absolutely hate them. I'm still trying to figure out why.
Bob, many of us who have done computer support have been burned badly by mis-information our Mac users were told by the Mac salesman. My first encounter with a Mac was when the big boss ordered one outside normal procurement and expected to do as you just did - just plug it in and expect it to find the network, as she had been told. Of course it was my fault that I hadn't anticipated her new Mac so I hadn't ordered the Novell option that at the time could only let Macs (just hers) talk to each other in a separate segregated Novell partition unseen by the secretaries pc's. In fact she bought the Mac when this 'integration' software was still vaporware so she not only had no way to share her documents, but we would have had to run separate Appletalk cabling if she needed to immediately share with any other Mac she bought for her top managers.
Next she discovered she couldn't sneakernet her diskettes to the secretares either, because they couldn't read them on their pc's. Somehow this was also my fault. So she printed her thoughts on her mac-only laserWriter for the secretaries to retype, and smugly proclaimed her Postscript was so gorgeous that the secretaries didn't mind typing all her stuff from scratch.
Ok, that was the beginning of my Mac experience. The end was when I paid good money for a used Personal Laserwriter for my sister, assuming she would love it as much as I like the HP Laserjet IIIp's that I still use today - many years after they were first sold (1989). You guessed it, the Mac version of this Canon -based printer was intentionally compatible only with 1989 era Macs, not universal like the nearly-identical HP IIIp's. Even the USB to serial adapters that came on the market later couldn't talk to it, Apple's adaptation had made it an unsupportable orphan.
I'm sure the users love them but the burden on support staff to make them perform the promised magic is a pain in the ass. And the user never believes they need any support since thats what they were told by the salesman.
Mac had over 15% market share back then, it's under 5% now. I'm sure they are pleasant for their users but I'll bet you still need an unseen magician somewhere in the organiation to make them work seamlessly with the rest of the organization.
Sorry, I don't usually rant in the mac threads but his was, after all, a Microsoft Win 98 etc thread. Are the 1998 Mac's (OS 8?) still supported and viable?
Bah humbug. I suppose if someone had ever bought me a Mac I would love it, but all my experience was trying to integrate it when I never had my hands on one. And the organization wouldn't pay for any training on how the magic works because 'they're so easy to use'.
Bob, see if that antagonistic support guy recognises anything familiar in this post.
It's sitting on a shelf in my barn. You know, you never know when you just may need one. 
