Not backing down on Apple attitude

I offer no apology for my major point: Apple does a disservice to the professional network managers and administrators with the ad starring Theresa McPherson as a lawyer who networked her own office with Macs.

In almost seven years of writing Wired Windows, I’ve never before had such an outpouring of reaction as I did for  my last column taking Apple to task for its  “switcher” television ads. My in-box overflowed, while hundreds of (mostly) scathing postings showed up in a special Network World Fusion  forum set up for this discussion. Much of it, sadly, repetitive and off-topic.

First, an apology to those interfacing their many brands of digital cameras to their Macs: IPhoto works very well. Not that  Janie Porche could have used it to “save Christmas,” though, because it wasn’t released until after then.

But I offer no apology for my major point: Apple does a disservice to the professional network managers and administrators with the  ad starring Theresa McPherson as a lawyer who networked her own office with Macs.

Yes, it’s a relative no-brainer to tie together five or six Macs, five or six PCs or a combination of the two for purposes of file sharing, picture trading or gaming. That’s not sufficient, though, for a corporate network (especially a lawyer’s corporate network). There’s backup and archive; authorization and authentication; e-mail and databases; routers, hubs and switches – those are what (in part) make up a corporate network. Plugging in a client operating system really is (and should be) a relative no-brainer. But running a network is a job for professionals.

There are professionals and amateurs in most vocations and avocations. I might be a pretty good weekend golfer (or tennis player) but I’m not ready to challenge Tiger Woods (or John McEnroe, for that matter). My golf and tennis are about socializing as much as about perfecting my game.

So too, my home network is more about sharing peripherals with my family than about value chain management, employee provisioning or customer portals – it’s an amateur effort (even though done by a professional).

The problem is that nontechnical corporate executives see the Apple ad and think that networking is a no-brainer for amateurs. That makes your job harder. And anything that makes your job harder is something that I’m going to criticize. The late nights, the weekends, the missed vacations – they make your job hard enough. You really don’t need supposed allies in the high-tech field undermining your efforts to create the optimal corporate network.