LOL - you don't know how well I can relate to you on this. The amount of times I get employment agents phoning me saying "I have this job for a SAP consultant" without even bothering to check which area of SAP its for.

Not at all, it depends on whether their specialization has anything to do with keeping up with the fast nature of technology. Most SAP professionals are functional specializations who know a particular business area and can relate it to SAP. For example, SAP PM is Plant Maintenance. Someone who is a specialist in SAP PM knows how to map plant maintenance business processes into SAP and configure the processes correctly in SAP. That means you have to understand the process of moving from reactive maintenance in a plant or mining environment to a preventative maintenance setup...Now, the big question is what does anything in this area have to do with VM's and why would someone who is an engineering understand this, or need to understand this?

Most people make the assumption that every IT professional needs to understand basic IT architecture and OS's, where in reality, the only people like this you will find in an SAP environment is something called a "SAP Basis Consultant" because he is the one who has to install and maintain the actual architecture and the database. If a PM consultant has a problem with the system, he'll call the basis guy and tell him to fix it, simple as that. Each module in SAP is so complex that specialisation in multiple areas is unlikely unless they specifically relate, so a PM consultant may know MM (Materials Management) but he is unlikely to know basis.

Along a similar line, I'm now seeing people in my office going down the salary sacrifice route to buy Macbooks and MBP's for working from home or in the field. The largest contributor to this uptake is the VM (associated here with VMWare), as our VPN client is Windows-based, our mail server is Exchange, and our main application suite tailored to IE6.

Corporate IT won't support it, but people continue to do it anyway - having multiple VM's instead of multiple machines; having a lightweight laptop rather than luggage; it's a no brainer.

Then again SAP isn't exactly ubiquitous, say, in education or small business yet Windows prevails despite its shortcomings. A friend of mine has just got a new Dell: Already some weird photo management software has started to bog down the startup procedure presumably as part of attaching some consumer level scanner and it is hard to find how to disable it.

I guess the average user just puts up with this nonsense, and will continue to buy MS in the future for the want of asking "is that all there is?"

Meanwhile even PC Mag users are getting fed up with Microsoft and all its works- Vista's 11 Pillars of Failure - Columns by PC Magazine

Can't agree more. The one thing I noticed about Mac having come from a PC background is how badly written the PC apps seem to be. How the hell does a scanning and printing application get to be 250MB installed? You mention about apps slowing down the machine on startup and I have first hand experience of this, the HP scan/print software is ridiculously oversized and impossible to remove on startup (i checked for ways to disable it and it doesn't seem like there are any).

The Mac in contrast seems to have small well written apps which take very little space and ironically have far more user friendly Gui's given the size difference.

Any idea why PC apps are written so badly? Is it just because programmers are churned out a dime a dozen with very little understanding of the architecture?

Possibly. Or it could be something to do with the architecture itself. This article 'From Win32 to Cocoa' is interesting reading. It is part 1 of a 3 part series being published on Ars Technica.

That's REALLY interesting MissionMan because I suspect HP is at fault in this case. And if an experienced user can't deal with it...

Meanwhile, eWeek has this to say.

Is It Time for IT to Learn a Mac?

“Between October 2007 and January 2008, two dozen researchers at IBM participated in an internal pilot program designed to investigate the possibility of migrating employees to the Mac platform. At the end of the trial, 86 percent of the testers asked to continue using their Macs, leading IBM to plan to expand the pilot to 100 users by the end of 2008. IBM Launches Pilot Program for Migrating to Macs — RoughlyDrafted Magazine
....
"I've spoken to IT directors who have liked many things about Macs, but the rarity of Mac technicians and the commonness of Windows skills was an issue for them," said Kay.
"We're at the high tide of Mac adoption, however. It's hard to say that Mac skills won't be more useful in the future than they are now."

The Mac is like a new and unusual food. if all you have eaten is steak and two veg then cordon blue may not be to your taste initially, in fact you may not understand it, but once you eat...you don't go back.

OK, probably not one to my better analogies but you get the idea.

Well thats certainly not my personal experience...but then I continue to happily use operating systems of all sorts. Though admittedly, I'd be dual booting my desktop with OSX/Vista if OSX would run on my commodity hardware.

I am really happy with my MacBook though. Aside from a couple of niggles I'm finding it a great secondary machine and I've really been impressed with its multitasking/performance.

Part 2 of the 3 part series 'From Win32 to Cocoa' I mentioned earlier has been published in Ars Technica.

Thanks. Great reading. As a non-developers its interesting to understand some of the differences.

Be aware that the author may be biased. For what it's worth, there are some comments on Slashdot that suggest as much - and the majority of comment on /. is usually anti-MS.

Most of the comments on Mactalk are anti-MS and it doesn't stop us talking here

I love how my mac starts up in 30 seconds 2 years after I bought it. Try and find a PC that does that.

here is my observation of the situation:

OS9 VS Win 2000/ Windows XP : 2000 was the winner hands down, OS9 and OS8 was perhaps a good OS in 1992 but by 2000 it was outdated and in need of replacement

OSX 10.1 - 10.3 VS Windows XP SP2: While OSX was starting to catch up in my opinion Windows XP offered more bang for the buck.

OSX 10.4 VS Windows XP: I know this sounds repetetive but the point I am making is that for some reason Microsoft was fast asleep while Apple actually realized they had a dud with OS9 and steadily improved OSX.

OSX 10.5 VS Windows XP VS Vista: OSX 10.5 in my oppinion was the nail in the cofine and made me switch...

As a matter of fact I think most IT people that are now going the Mac route are doing it for the simple reason that they can run both Windows and Mac OSX natively. In other words you buy one hardware platform and get to run any OS vs. buy a PC and you get to run Windows and perhaps Linux if you can find the right drivers...