Spend Management in the Small Business Office -- Going Mac
I set my wife up on a Macintosh last week (with some serious help from the local Apple store), switching from a PC. She got the cool aluminum Macbook (I make do with the cheap white plastic variant). So far, she's quickly come to realize the benefits of a 2-3 second wake time from sleep mode, not to mention the speed of the applications. I reckon having been on a Mac as my primary notebook for a few months, that I save around 30 minutes per day, on average, not having to wait for the computer to wake from sleep, launch applications, reboot, etc. Mobileme integration (which synchs email, calendars and contacts across PDAs and multiple desktop/notebook systems) also saves significant time and costs far less than Exchange. All in all, a pretty cool total cost savings. What's not to like about it? PowerPoint for Mac is a wretched application in far too many ways to write about here, but you can always run the PC version if you're so inclined (by running a Windows environment on the Mac, which is easy).
QuickBooks Online also requires Internet Explorer, which requires Windows (but again, this is not a big deal). I also need a special cable to connect a monitor when I'm presenting at a conference or at a client (usually for these meetings, I bring another notebook, a PC, along anyway just to simplify things and to show I'm not a Mac bigot). Besides these few shortcomings, I'm thrilled. I can say with complete confidence that going Mac will save us over a thousand dollars per week in productivity gains. After all, time is money. And that makes the Mac a smart Spend Management decision for research and Office intensive environments -- particularly in consulting and publishing -- if there ever was one. If you close and open a notebook more than once a day, you'll wonder how you ever lived before making the switch.
- Jason Busch
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In the risk of starting a flame war, I would really like to know the depth of analysis you used to classify your thousands of dollars of savings per week. More so as a warning against moving to an exclusive Mac environment for small businesses, I wanted to put some thoughts down here for people thinking about making the switch.
First off, you mention that your solution is less expensive that Exchange. Small business server (with exchange bundled in) will set you back about $500, and can be run on older equipment, such as a used server for $500 (I am being generous). So, your overall investment will be about $1,000, and the solution will easily get you through 3 years.
Let us assume you have a 3 person small business
Your mobile me subscription = $149/year x 3 = $447 (for the family pack).
Your simple solution for running a windows environment on a Mac = $140/license x 3 seats = $420 (legally, you need to buy these liscenses)
Your special cable =$50 (we will assume your team can share that and you don't need three of them)
So, Exchange with Server equals $1,000
Your apple solution =$917
Now, we are not even talking about the laptops themselves, in which a typical Apple laptop is 3 to 4 times the cost of a equally spec'd intel pc.
Now, in the "Microsoft" solution above (small business server) you also own your own server and the content on the server. You are only limited to the physical hard disk space and processing power of that box. You also have the power to quickly rectify problems, unlike when an Apple service goes down and you could spend days waiting for them to fix your mobileme, or months waiting for them to get push mail working.
I don't know what operating systems you were running on your old laptops, but how are you saving 30 minutes per day on start-up times/launch applications/etc.? A properly configured machine should take about 20-45 seconds to wake from hybernate in Vista or XP. I have a 5 year old laptop with tons of bloatware that only takes 35 seconds to wake up and be online.
I am not saying that Mac is not right for your business (or all businesses), it sounds like it is right for you. But to generally say that it is the best solution for any small business is just not right. Most small business owners are not carrying a laptop around to start it up and shut it down 20 times per day to write a blog, and you should qualify it as such.
Bottom line: maybe it's not for everyone, but I'm thrilled with the Macbook for a small business despite a few short comings. As a somewhat well paid consultant and writer who values his time in the hundreds of dollars per hour, I've lost in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of productivity to Mr. Gates over the past decade because of slow boots, Vista problems and the like. The idiosyncratic Mac is a huge breath of fresh air on so many levels. And there's no need to qualify that statement.
But I did need change. I find that if you take good loving care of Windows on a PC...dutifully shut down your computer each and every night, delete and archive emails, file accordingly etc. then, the PC environment works very well. I've used it forever. But the Mac has given me at least 30 mins/day of additional productivity. It's lightening fast and takes no time to open/start/switch to another application. But as they say, the proof is in the pudding. Ask me about this in 9 months when this thing is loaded up with junk. Then I'll tell you which I prefer. But for now, I'm mildly optimistic.
Google provides a free shared calendar - what else would you need Exchange for?
MS solutions are primarily suited for distrustful lawsuit-exposed large corporations with straitjacketed needs to lock everything down. Smaller organizations with educated, reliable staff & owners running the show don't have that "need".
Good going Jason - my own 1-year old maxed out laptop running XP was snappy the first few days - before all the vital anti-spyware, anti-virus, anti-malware applications were loaded - now dead cats can outrun it.
If you feel that way about MS then why not take it a step further, go completely open source. Between Open Office, Firefox, Linux (ubuntu or another distro), and thunderbird, you can free yourself from both MS and from Apple.
Don't get my wrong, I've worked with everything from DOS, Windows 3.11, NT3.51 - even OS2 - to various Linux flavors. Perhaps I should give the penguin another try.
BTW, I don't "feel that way" about MS - I gave it a thoughtful analysis based on Jason's needs. MS' products definitely have their place - although predominantly where drones cluster.
With just a browser and an internet connection - what can't you do these days?