A security expert has put a cat among the pigeons by suggesting that small enterprises and home offices should migrate completely to the Apple Mac platform and OSX.
Winn Schwartau, president of security awareness consulting firm Interpact Inc and author of several books about security, used a column in US IT magazine Network World to argue the cost of using, securing and supporting PCs was significantly higher than for Macs.
Schwartau claimed a total cost of ownership model he had designed demonstrated that “for my small enterprise, owning a WinTel box for three years costs twice as much as owning a MacTel. When I talked with several of our clients, I found that the burdened cost of ownership per PC – just for support – ranged from $1,300 to $4,000 per year”.
The TCO tool includes all the third-party security products needed to keep a WinTel machine secure and checkbox compliant, the prorated costs of per-user upgrades, patches, relicensing expenses and overhead factor from lawyers, managers and technical staff, along with issues like reliability costs, downtime per user per year, productivity losses/gains, reboots and system maintenance.
PC vendors were quick to dispute his claims. Liam Halpin, at Fujitsu-Siemens, said “The figure of $1,400 – $4,000 per machine per year sounds like a vast overstatement of the facts. The average cost per desk for firewall and antivirus can be below $100 per annum per machine. I can’t see how the balance can be made up in IT staff time, as most networks and standalone PCs are now protected with auto update and scanning which requires little or no IT staff involvement.”
He also suggested that the additional costs of retraining IT staff to migrate from a Windows-based platform to a Mac platform “combined with the fact that Macs are generally more expensive to acquire than PCs, would by far outweigh the costs associated with the maintenance of a PC environment”.
Martin Cullen, HP PS group country manager, said it was “difficult to understand how he [Schwartau] came up with those answers. Is he taking a full view or a snapshot view”. He added that the Mac platform was “too marginal to really be a player in the mainstream sense”.
Schwartau argued corporations stuck to Windows-based machines “partly out of habit and partly because the Dell/HP/Network Associates/Symantec representatives are in their faces every day with next-day promises. Consider this the endless cycle of the heroin sale in IT.”
While he did not expect any major enterprise to make a large scale conversion to the Mac platform, Schwartau claimed many large organisations were deploying Mac networks across specific departments. “Entire sales and marketing departments within some financial firms are actively migrating to Mac and MacTel,” he stated.
Schwartau’s TCO spreadsheet is available for download here:
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