Mac Users..

[RhinoZ]

Just an observation....
My company got bought out less than a year ago, by a larger American company. No biggie, most of us were able to keep our jobs , but our upper mangement is getting a little top heavy with some American big wigs coming in and filling/and creating some of the gaps.
These guys come in with their macbooks.
So here's my beef, and tell me if I'm wrong, because I really don't know anything about a Mac.
Our company is a PC based company with whatever MS network community it's run on. All our software is PC based from MS office, and outlook, to our own inhouse applications, our test software, to everything. So I'm thinking that alot of companys work the same way, alot of PC based software. So how do these big wigs get any work done in a PC environment on a Mac. Can you just hook up a Mac book to a PC network and tada your in, and you can interface with outlook and away you go?
What I really want to know is, what's the real drive of these people to own a Macbook? Is it that great at all the other stuff you do on it, that who cares if you can't run inhouse PC applications or do anything on a Mac that the rest of your company can do on their PC. I don't think the American company that bought us are on a Mac network, but I don't know for sure, but that's got to be expensive?
Like I said I never had a chance to work on a Mac, so I know I'm missing out on something.

Please enlighten me.
Thanks

[Jessterw]

It's become far easier to be a Mac user in a Windows/MS-based computing environment. There are still some niggles in the realm of networking and with Exchange Server connectivity (MS chose to cripple their own Mac Outlook counterpart Entourage so that it is all but useless in that regard), but file sharing is generally a non-issue and now with Intel-based Macs and things like Boot Camp and Parallels, running Windows and Windows-based applications is damn easy to do.

Now, to be quite honest, at my former employer as the network/systems admin I would never have let a user bring in or request a Mac for use on our network. The reason is simple - we were so heavily invested in MS technologies that adding a Mac to the mix would have caused all sorts of management and security (as in user rights) problems. I would make the same call now if in the same position.

Contrast that to here at home where I have had Macs and Windows-based PC's living peacefully together with no issues.

Back to your question though, I'm going to suggest that these "big wigs" are either long-time Mac users or they think a nice shiny MacBook (Pro?) is a status symbol. The IT department should know which by the type of support requests they get from these fellows.

[az]

They probably also don't need to or know how to use the software your developers etc. use on their PCs.

[Gurm]

My experiences with "BigWigs" who use Macs is as Jesster has suggested - they think that the things are status symbols. They defend them as staunchly as any other Mac Zealot will. A few years ago, the big problem was mail encoding. We had a couple bigwigs who insisted on using Macs, and kept sending out mangled email because whatever mail program they used couldn't do MIME properly to save its life. I honestly don't know how they ever managed to get ANY mail sent, because whenever they sent to our network (which was a huge university network with *nix servers handling all the mail) it ALWAYS got broken. And of course this was OUR fault.

Finally I ended up going over and "upgrading" their version of Mac Office to one that actually WORKED with the files from our version of Office.

But it took MONTHS to get there. I honestly just think that they didn't care about not being able to work with everyone else. I know they had their lackeys print out a lot of stuff they couldn't open.

Macs are nowhere near that bad any more in terms of compatibility, but that's pretty much the mindset.

[RhinoZ]

Thanks guys, I assumed as much.
No offence to the real Mac users around here

[SpiralDragon]

heh... i have an HP laptop... on the lid i have the apple logo stiker just for fun... when asked about that.. i boot up and ask them "what os do you want to use today?"

i have
WinXP
MacOS
Fedora
Vista

all runing off my laptop
of cours atm i only use xp... the othres are there just for me to experiment on..... well... the mac os is just there for fun... to show my mac zelot freinds that thir mac books are not unic in any kind of way

[Nowhere]

...
to show my mac zelot freinds that thir mac books are not unic in any kind of way

IMHO...they are. Simply because they are the cheapest. Yep, that's right...at least when I'm comparing them here to prices of laptops from other vendors with comparable, small size and long battery life (and of course other specs).
It's like almost only Apple understands that laptop should be portable... :/
(I guess I will be working/earning for a Macbook this Summer...)

[Sasq]

IMHO...they are. Simply because they are the cheapest. Yep, that's right...at least when I'm comparing them here to prices of laptops from other vendors with comparable, small size and long battery life (and of course other specs).
It's like almost only Apple understands that laptop should be portable... :/
(I guess I will be working/earning for a Macbook this Summer...)

you haven't tried lugging my macbook pro 17" around have you

[Nowhere]

Well, have only seen/used smallest iBooks and Macbooks