iChat, Mail.app, FileVault, and even Al Gore -> Panther - THE Business OS
Forgive me for starting a new thread and hopefully no one else has repeated this elsewhere, but Pather is the first Mac OS that will make business sit up and pay attention...a lot of attention.
First of all, iChat obviously can save businesses a TON of money. Now employees at separate locations can interface at vastly reduced cost. Admittedly, bandwidth isn't free, but who says you have to video conference. You can get away with simple audio conferencing for far cheaper than it would cost to call coast to coast. This is simply huge.
Then we have the new threading features in Mail. It's perfect for keeping track of lengthy email conversations that involve multiple parties. You can group all the email from various people that talk about that certain problem in manufacturing. Very cool.
Next up is FileVault. We've all heard the stories of CIA and FBI agents leaving laptops in airports, cafes, etc. Not to mention all the corporate users that do this. Now imagine they're carrying around Powerbooks that the IT folks have locked down with permanent FileVault encryption. Essentially, you've got seamless security for dummies. The end user wouldn't know it's even running in the background encrypting everything on the fly. This is huge for the government and businesses that place a high value on their data.
And that's where Al Gore comes in. Who better to sell this to the government? He knows the people to talk to and what wheels to grease. Whatever your political views, you have to admit he's a damn good choice. The man knows the right people. And his efforts can go beyond just hardware...
Now just imagine the CIA buying Powerbooks...thousands of them. Nothing like a nice little government order to bump up those sales figures.
Edit: It'd be nice if I could spell Pather...doh!...Panther.
And synp's thread reminded me of IPSec VPN. I also seem to recall VPN support was in X before, so touting it says a lot I think.
First of all, iChat obviously can save businesses a TON of money. Now employees at separate locations can interface at vastly reduced cost. Admittedly, bandwidth isn't free, but who says you have to video conference. You can get away with simple audio conferencing for far cheaper than it would cost to call coast to coast. This is simply huge.
Then we have the new threading features in Mail. It's perfect for keeping track of lengthy email conversations that involve multiple parties. You can group all the email from various people that talk about that certain problem in manufacturing. Very cool.
Next up is FileVault. We've all heard the stories of CIA and FBI agents leaving laptops in airports, cafes, etc. Not to mention all the corporate users that do this. Now imagine they're carrying around Powerbooks that the IT folks have locked down with permanent FileVault encryption. Essentially, you've got seamless security for dummies. The end user wouldn't know it's even running in the background encrypting everything on the fly. This is huge for the government and businesses that place a high value on their data.
And that's where Al Gore comes in. Who better to sell this to the government? He knows the people to talk to and what wheels to grease. Whatever your political views, you have to admit he's a damn good choice. The man knows the right people. And his efforts can go beyond just hardware...
Now just imagine the CIA buying Powerbooks...thousands of them. Nothing like a nice little government order to bump up those sales figures.
Edit: It'd be nice if I could spell Pather...doh!...Panther.
And synp's thread reminded me of IPSec VPN. I also seem to recall VPN support was in X before, so touting it says a lot I think.
Comments
Originally posted by Arty50
Edit: It'd be nice if I could spell Pather...doh!...Panther.
I didn't even notice until you said it.
Nice post by the way.
Now if Apple can change its Customer Service to a more business appropriate level!!!! ie "Business" needs to be more obvious as a top level tab on the Apple website.
What you'd need is either the ability to connect directly to a remote Rendezvous user, or for Mac OS X Server to include an IM server that could act as your central messaging server.
As for encryption - well PGP is pretty damned good already, although I agree about the 'idiot proofness' of the Filevault setup.
Originally posted by Gee4orce
Well.....I was thinking about the iChat thing too. The only problem is that it requires all your employees to have AIM ids, or all be on the same local subnet for Rendezvous. This is just not going to do it for large corporates.
Actually, you can use an AIM name or a .Mac name. How about corporate .Mac?
Since you can now use your mac to talk long distance for the cost your internet provider charges, I hope phone companies that provide internet service continue providing internet service for the mac.
Originally posted by agent302
Actually, you can use an AIM name or a .Mac name. How about corporate .Mac?
I thought of that as soon as Steve mentioned syncing a document between multiple machines via .Mac. That's incredibly useful to business, but the current terms of service are not useful to business, and Apple shouldn't offer a more robust guarantee of service until they can back it up. They're obviously still working on that.
A corporate .Mac would be good. A generalized service that allowed corporations to easily set up "iDisks" on their own servers, and use it as if it were .Mac, would be a gold mine (and it would keep Apple from having to implement a centralized, uptime-critical service, which sounds like a support nightmare).