Can You Run Your Business on a Mac?


A Mac for business? That's the question at c|net Asia David Coursey asks three small-business operators, running companies of up to around 12 employees

Coursey's conclusions? Yes, but you have to be prepared to make some sacrifices. But these are not major ones. The major utilities and business productivity titles are all there: Micrsoft Office; Norton Utilities and Anti-Virus. What's missing is MS Exchange Server for OS X, says Coursey. Although it's been promised, a beta has yet to surface. Quickbooks and MYOB are, of course, widely available for Mac.

Databases? That's Filemaker's business. Plenty of firms run their web pages off Filemaker (Windows or Mac). But Coursey says he's yet to find a low-end equivalent of MS Frontpage on Mac. We'd probably agree, given that Claris Homepage works only with OS 9/Classic.

For specialised Windows applications, VirtualPC can run these apps, albeit at considerably reduced speed. Networking, whether wireless or hardwired, is a breeze, as the article notes.

Analysis: The generally positive tone of this article aside, I still find Coursey's 'keep a Wintel machine in the back for emergencies' conclusion somewhat annoying. It essentially defeats the purpose of the article. He also underplays the Mac's ease of networking. The article implies that it's speaking of Mac<-->Mac networking, whereas Jaguar, in particular, makes connecting to Wintel machines (or anything on a TCP/IP network, really, very easy. Not to mention Rendezvous support, now being built into several network printers from manufacturers such as HP and Canon.

Simple web pages? Well, we suppose you could just build a page (or DB) in the bundled AppleWorks 6 and save it as HTML. Doesn't Frontpage screw with code or use non-standard, IE type HTML anyway? Porting the old HomePage module into AppleWorks for X wouldn't be a bad idea. It wouldn't cost Apple a great deal to do, we imagine.