Re: [WinMac] Studies on cost of Macs/PCs in offices???

Bruce Johnson(johnson[at]Pharmacy.Arizona.EDU)
Wed, 16 Sep 1998 07:47:16 -0700

Bill Chapman wrote:
>
> Joe:
>
> I can't agree with your premise at all. The systems support for
> Mac's and PC's takes almost twice as much knowledge as either
> platform, alone. It has gotten better with MacOS 8, but just the
> nomenclature differences cause substantial re-learn time when going
> from one platform to the other.
>
> Consider such things as telnet vs mcsamson, ftp vs fetch, ethertalk
> vs Ethernet, Open Transport vs ????, extensions vs device drivers,
> etc., etc.

Uhhh: telnet vs tera term vs ewan vs whatever the old Novell program was "Host
something or other". (all PC programs in use at our site. All handled with
ease..."Oh yeah...the program I connect to Medline with...")

ftp vs wsftp vs winftp vs fetch vs anarchie (ok, the people writing the Mac
programs had more imagination..;-)

Ether_Talk_ and Ether_net_ are two different things! EtherTalk is the
implementation of AppleTalk protocol that runs on the Ethernet transport. You
might as well throw in TCP/IP, NetBEUI, IPX/SPX into that stew as well.

If your tech support people are hung up learning simple program names (and
don't know the difference between a protocol and transport) ghod help your users...

In point of fact, none of these are all that different, more along the lines
of the differences between MS Word, Word Perfect, and Ami Pro...they're all
word processors and different in little ways, but the general concepts are the
same.

Once you've learned two or three, all of them sort of blend together anyway.
The difference between supporting Mac OS8 and Win 95 are not as big as
supporting the difference between Win95, NT and 3.11...

There is a learning curve to going to one platform or another, but a great
deal of the knowledge is transferable between them...despite the OS holy
wars...all computer systems are more alike than not.

You do NOT need "twice as much knowledge" to support a dual platform shop.
What you do need are a commitment from IS to do the support. All too often 'oh
that's mre than we can support' is an excuse, not a reason from IS people, who
depite their protestations somehow find the time to learn all the differences
between their Novell, NT and Unix server software...but of course...those are
_their_ toys, not the users.

Besides, the greater problem in diagnosing broken users computers more often
lies in human rather than computer engineering:

Helpdesk:"What's wrong?"

User:"Something's wrong with YOUR network...my computer is suddenly crashing
all the time" (note...when things work it's THE network, when it's broken it's
YOUR network)

Helpdesk:"Ok, have you added any new programs or anything to your computer?"

User: "No!"

Helpdesk:"What were you doing just before it crashed?"

90% of the time the User WILL answer:"I was checking out this program I got
from [the internet, a friend, Bob the office computer guru, in the mail] but I
kow _that's_ not the problem, it works fine on [my brother's, my friends, Bob
the office guru's, the computer in the brochure] computer!"

Helpdesk: <sigh>

Bruce "been there, done that, bled on the system console" Johnson

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Wed Sep 16 1998 - 11:39:23 PDT