The author of this post requested to remain anonymous because
he still does work for companies mentioned here.

I have worked with Ericsson for 4 years followed by Cisco Systems for 6 years. Both companies were very advanced users of hi-tech. Both insisted on extremely accurate time reporting for every imaginable task, both refused to open tracking items for PC wows. The sort of thing like you arriving the office and need to reboot your PC 3 times before it get onto corporate network ( e.g. 30 min lost). Or PC (almost) hangs or becomes very slow as it has run out of memory and you have important docs open so you you spend the next 40 min slowly closing every open application to ensure a safe shutdown. In Cisco all PCs were spec'd for email and internet use. However over 50% of staff were engineers in the field and we all got the same crummy 512M of RAM. Smart engineers went and bought their own.

No effort was ever made to track time for now applications to calculate the actual cost of introduction in terms of lost productivity. It allowed IT departments to hide behind sloppy products they supply to their clients. Sure, outsource your whole IT to Bangalore (Cisco) But at least allow everyone to track how much time they waste attempting to explain so some half English speaking indian what your problem is.

I think if more companies like IBM did trials with MACs and accurately recorded the user non-productive time due to not having full PC availability then you would see big wigs suddenly wake up. Microsoft has been so successful because they have hidden behind the vested interest of IT departments refusing to expose just how much time their clients are losing because of MS Windows. Its called saving your own asses.

I would estimate that while working with Win XP I would spend minimum of 10% of my productive time solving WinXP issues. On a MAC maybe 1-2%. At least when a MAC crashes it just goes down quick and hard! but Apple have basically stuck to the Unix principle of keep it small and simple and let the combinations of different flexible programs tackle your problem.

All this is a huge hidden cost for companies who would be aiming at 500k-1000k $USD per employee in terms of revenue. They should wake up and smell the coffee..

p.s. I'm suffering on MAC without a good ssh client.The only reason I run Parallel is so I can continue to use SecureCRT. I have hundreds of machines to maintain and there seems to be nothing for MAC that allows good complete telnet/ssh/Sessionstorage/logging/password storage/Key strorage and generation. Any suggestions?

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