WARNING: The opinions expressed in this piece are gross generalisations based on my own personal experiences and observations. It is not something to be taken to heart but neither are the points things that don't happen. After all I've seen and experienced them and I exist so so must they, although there is that whole Dark City thing that could be used as an example of experiences of not being real I suppose.

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Many people want to see Macs all over the show and this of course means in the business sector where everything can be done on the Mac.

There is of course no reason why this can't be done and there are many apps that can do every part of business from accounts to inventory, to project management to EFTPOS and tills.

But the problem is that Macs will never become mainstream in business because business is always let down  by three types of people:

Lawyers, Accountants, and Politicians

Traditionally these people are the most tight fisted shills on the planet. They cream huge amounts off us "little people" and yet they spend nothing on getting things done which accounts for how they scam us by charging huge amounts of money, they do nothing all day and charge us for the time they take to do something.

My contempt for these people aside I have proof that Macs can't make it in business until these twats change their ways.

Politicians:

It's easy to look at government departments and see them upgrading their machines every three years and think that they are spending a lot of money but this is a facade. Yes they get some alright machines but they don't buy them they lease them. This allows them to spend less because a): they're a government department thus get better deals than everyone and b): leasing huge amounts of computers means they spend less on bulk anyway.

When it comes to computers it's always about the best deals and in truth Macs don't have good corporate deals. If they did more people would be interested.

But not only that government departments seem to have this "Windows Only" mantra thinking that they would have to pay people to support them. But if you had all your machines being Macs then the support costs would drop. The IT department would be better spent administering the network and ensuring that the backbone stays up rather than worrying about some shlop of a minister not being able to connect his BlackBerry to his machine properly. Once setup on a Mac the actual chances of something going wrong is low to medium not high to high.

My dad owns Manaia's only service station and he has a garage that does warrants. As such he needs to communicate to the LTSA. The LTSA has declined to bring its systems into the 21st century instead preferring that everyone connect using dial-up. This makes it difficult at times for dad to process a warrant because it means the lines are tied up with other garages. If they allowed Internet access from anywhere via a webpage through a VPN instead of an application that sits on a machine then two problems would be solved  quite quickly a): support for an application that needs to be updated thus sent by mail to everyone because doing it over the phone line will take too long and will prevent people from processing warrants b): warrants can be processed faster thus the system runs smoother. In this case it would remove the need to run Windows entirely so long as a moron doesn't design the webpage. Interestingly enough, if a webpage is needing to be developed to support the major browsers a government department will actually use Macs. LTSA doesn't appear to be one of these types of departments.

But government departments tend not to spend money upgrading unless they have to. Take NZ Post for example, they're still running Win2K networks as are Child Youth and Family, among others.

But there is one government department that is the biggest holdout yet which leads me nicely to...

Lawyers:

A couple of years ago I spent about 6 months involved in a project to upgrade the Ministry of Justice computers in Wellington. They got a heap of HP D530s (which incidentally were pretty much reaching end of life at the time). You'd think this would be a good thing until you realise every single one was running NT4.0. Yes, NT4.0. If many of the government departments were behind the pack running Win2K, then by comparison the Ministry of Justice were pure dinosaurs. But then the whole atmosphere of the place were relics of a past that most of society has moved on from.

Many of the apps were running on database systems that no longer exist let alone are supported. Hell, I'm surprised that they were using Word and not WordPerfect.

If lawyers aren't going to upgrade their systems to modern hardware then how can Macs easily communicate with them considering lawyers are using systems that were designed in the hey day of Mac incompatibility with Windows?

This lack of communication leads me nicely to...

Accountants:

I was talking to my dad the other weekend. As I said he owns the only service station in Manaia and he recently bought an HP laptop. Nice enough system but I joked to him that he should have waited because the new iMacs were out. But he said that it would be nice but none of his software works on Macs. I thought he was running Cognito's MoneyWorks but he's running Computer Concept's Cash Manager which has no Mac version.

Why is he running this program? Because his accountant said that's the program he needs to run because that's the program that the accountant uses. How bollocks is that?

I said to dad I said "That's dumb. The accountant works for you no the other way around. He should be using systems you use not you be forced to use software he uses." Maybe my view is wrong but the way I see it, if you pay someone to handle something for you, such as accounts, then they become your employee for the duration of the work. As such they need to work in with you not the other way around.

Anyway, dad has to use this system that looks bodged together, is actually designed for farmers not most businesses, and is incompatible with every other accounting program that I can see of. There's no mention of QuickBooks, MYOB, or even CSV import export and yet these formats are effectively the standard the world over - not that that's necessarily a good thing.

I said that the accountant should be able to handle CSV files and he said that they probably could but that they'll charge him more to sort things out. That sounded dumb but then they are accountants so I wouldn't put it past them.

Accountants also handle the purse strings and in my experience they are very short sighted. They will look at the cost of buying Macs and then the cost of buying a Windows based PC and see that the Macs are way more expensive. Try and explain to them overall cost of a Mac is dramatically less than a Windows PC and they still won't listen because the initial cost is too much. I've seen this happen when I suggested things to improve our workflow I was immediately shot down by my manager who just happened to be an accountant by trade. As such our systems are still inefficient and makes us want to shoot someone.

We're going to have our call system upgraded in October. That's nice considering it's NINE YEARS OLD and not designed to do the things we're trying to do with it. Oh but the cost of the upgrade was "too much to do it earlier and the system works now so  why upgrade?" but the reality is the system DOESN'T work properly and it's costing the company MORE in the long run having a system trying to do something it's not designed to do.

Needless to say they only way Macs will make it big in business is for them to make the most killer apps to run. Something that is compatible with current systems but does far more. Something that will make large businesses sit up and take notice that there IS a better and smarter way to do things and yet make it only run on a Mac. To do this I think there needs to be a huge company that is made up of separate companies that includes Apple. Imagine a killer app that includes iGTD, Checkout, OmniOutliner and OmniPlan, as well as a replacement and Mac specific version of MYOB and QuickBooks. Make a killer app that has everything a business large or small needs to run and then make it super power, super easy, and good looking and then make it Mac only and see if we can tempt those Windows LUsers over to our side.