Is Client Platform Diversity Taking Hits Due to Budget Cutting?
Despite the failing U.S. economy last year, higher education institutions were
creative about finding budget dust and delaying the inevitable. As the second
year of budget cuts hits IT planning on campus this year, one way IT departments
might reduce costs is to homogenize the campus computing environment. That possibility,
even likelihood, is ratcheting up the tension surrounding the arguments most
of us have heard before—only this time it's not just the usual intense
fervor over preferences, the bottom line is diminishing dollars.
Many purchasing staff already believe that when comparably configured with
their PC equivalents, there is a significantly larger initial cost for a Macintosh
desktop and laptop machine. And many IT managers believe that keeping help desk
and other client support personnel up to date on both Mac and Windows operating
systems is a non-trivial cost that can be eliminated in this time of shrinking
budgets. It's really hard to justify spending resources bringing staff up to
speed in order to support a type of machine that represents a small and dwindling
percent of all your client boxes.
Macintosh supporters lobby in support of diversity, saying that the Mac OS
d'esn't crash and is easier to learn, thus reducing the amount of training for
users and staff time needed to support them. And, of course, there are those
in the IT world itself who personally prefer the Macintosh and argue that if
we only had a Mac emulator to parallel Virtual PC, that Macs would be the obvious
superior choice. Adding to the decision making variables, Macintosh users among
influential senior non-IT faculty and staff are often in a position to sway
decision making.
It's very hard to argue in any environment that "techies" are the best judge
of what tools faculty and staff need to do their jobs. IT managers who personally
prefer PCs may not only be in favor of platform diversity and in favor of user
choice, but also wary of IT departments' reputations for "making their jobs
easier" by eliminating choice and controlling availability. If it were solely
up to IT staff, some would say, we'd all be using dumb terminals right now,
with a central administration pushing out to us whatever software it thinks
we need, when it thinks we need it—with ugly consequences. Anyone who has
ever traveled with a Windows XP machine on which they do not have an administrator
log-in—and tried to add a printer driver, at home or in a hotel on the
weekend—understands the unintended complexities that can be introduced
by too much control.
On the other hand, many institutions have realized that they are undisputedly
wedded to Windows for client machines. With rare exceptions it is no longer
a systemwide choice between PC or Mac, but an inevitability that Windows will
be supported—and that Macintosh might be. Financial managers no longer ask
for cost comparisons between the two systems, instead they ask about the additional
costs of support, maintenance, software, and service for two platforms instead
of one. All of this is further complicated, of course by Linux.
Even as PCs take over the higher education campus, albeit more slowly than
they've overwhelmed the corporate campus, there are pockets of resistance.
In
schools of education, where graduates will depart for a professional world where
Macs are a larger part of the scene, they remain more common on campus. In a
survey of concurrently running software licenses, many would be surprised to
see how highly-ranked Macs are overall, despite their usually lesser numbers
on campus, since many users in the creative arts will be running several resource-intensive
applications on a Mac at once: Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Quark, a video editor,
etc. Despite client platform diversity niches, however, intra-departmental diversity
is on the wane, despite the argument that by forcing homogeneity you may be
depriving some specific hard core, very productive users of their favored tools.
It is inarguable, in the short term at least, that most students are headed
for a world of PCs, and may anticipate rarely ever doing more at work than running
an e-mail client, a browser, Word, and Excel.
This writer believes that Apple hardware has more style and panache, and that
the Mac OS is more stable and more innovative. And, finally, the cross-platform
compatibility for every application I use is near 100 percent. I am even lucky
enough to probably be able to sweep up enough department "budget dust" later
in the year to be privileged to make the tough decision between Yao's 14" PowerBook
G4 and Mini-Me's 17" PowerBook G4. But the fiscal realities at work on campus
do point to a greater reduction in client platform diversity in higher education
institutions, so maybe it'll be a loaded Dell Precision M50. This may be the
last year I have such a choice, unless I am willing to put up the cash myself.
[Postscript: Notice that I am not addressing how Linux fits into the above
debate. I think the fiscal crisis is going to badly stunt acceptance of Linux,
even if for the wrong reasons. Maybe that's a topic for another opinion piece—if
you're interested in writing one, contact me: [email protected].]
