TechFlash - Latest Comments in Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

lenny — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 06:38:00 -0000

White House should follow suit of FBI and switch completely to MacOS! Which, if I remember correctly, FBI made a switch to Macs few years back citing windows OS virus and other malware vulnerability and high maintenance costs...

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

Angelo — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:23:00 -0000

Now, not being able to perform "the most basic of online tasks" on Win XP seems downright stupid. I'm pretty sure most people do that and much more with it.

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

Rob — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:20:00 -0000

You people are idiots and articles like this are pointless. People voted for Obama to bring about important changes that effect everyones lives. People are losing their jobs and the economy is failing. If all you think about are irrelevent details such as which OS he and his staff are using then you've completely lost touch and are making a complete mockery of Obama an his Presidency.

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

Rob — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:20:00 -0000

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

John — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 02:49:00 -0000

QUICK - get the stem cell research going, get Steve up on the table and fix him, and you'll have cool new Mac stuff for the rest of the administration.

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

Charlie — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 01:20:00 -0000

Chris said that corporations cannot run on Macs.
Apple is a corporation and it runs on Macs.

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

Mickey — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 13:07:00 -0000

QUOTE <john>: "F'ing ignornant morons. Most of those posting here have no clue about security. As an IT Security professional, I can tell you that I can hack a blackberry signal in a blink of of an eye. The same with your wireless MAC and Windows notebooks."

...but, not know that the word 'Mac' is not an acronym. (MAC, like in the phrase "My network uses MAC address filtering" is proper usage.)

...or the proper way to spell 'ignorant'

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

Mark McCallister — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 08:39:00 -0000

First....this is not just about Mac vs. PC, it is about people who are not able to adapt on the fly.

Second.....Anyone who says "Apple tax" for "Cool looking" devices is a moron!!! Apple has been able to prove to the CIO's and CFO's of Google, Cisco, Johnson and Johnson, IBM, and oh yeah.....the FDA(a government agency), that Macs in fact have a lower TCO than PCs in a corporate setting.

Third....Did anyone consider that the 6 year old software is because the White House either didn't want to go to Vista, or didn't want to pay more licensing fees to Micro$oft? Dell's, HP's, and Lenovo's employees are still running XP as the standard OS, with an option to upgrade.

Fourth.....The particular function they are referring to having difficulty with is basic video editing. Who OWNS the market for video editing......APPLE(Final Cut Studio, Shake, Motion)!!!

The White House will likely stay with Windows for most of their users(familiarity, plus MS Exchange), and they will probably have a large percentage of desktops than laptops(security), but if you don't know what you're talking about, you should save your opinion.

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

CoffeeJedi — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 07:32:00 -0000

Oh look out everyone! John up there is an IT PROFESSIONAL!

Oooooooooh, he's the ONLY ONE of THOSE on here.

We better watch out, or he might hack our Blackberries in the "blink of an eye".

Dude, chill out. :D

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

John — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 04:30:00 -0000

F'ing ignornant morons. Most of those posting here have no clue about security. As an IT Security professional, I can tell you that I can hack a blackberry signal in a blink of of an eye. The same with your wireless MAC and Windows notebooks.

Sheesh... You people just luv to hate and unfortunately our country has too many of you. Europe or China will soon own us due to your mentality (or lack therof).

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

PCvsMac — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:03:00 -0000

I use both, but I do all my emailing with a Mac. Just safer!

Most of my friends use Yahoo or another mail portal service that does not use a mailtool on the virus loving Window's OS.

MS is stupid for not going to a stable based UNIX OS in Sys 7.

I guess Obama and staff are in for a LOT of down time using VISTA. And time is OUR money!

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

Ben W — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:55:00 -0000

Can we as a nation afford to pay the apple tax just to get cool looking devices?

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

Thomas — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:31:00 -0000

Why not compromise? Hackintoshes to the people!

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

ParkerKincaid — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:14:00 -0000

It's being assumed that the "old Microsoft software" is referring to the OS. This wasn't specifically stated. It's quite possible that they meant the software installed under XP be it Microsoft Office or whatever other software they found themselves in need of using. If the problem was simply XP then I the wording was bad.

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

tacosaladday — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 09:58:00 -0000

Sweet! So us tax payers can pay for Apple laptops which avg cost for one is 3x that of a PC laptop. SMRT!

You can still do your JOB with a PC, people. You know - when you aren't writing bad songs or a terrible screenplay about relationships which I believe most Apple users are fond of.

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

kL — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 09:18:00 -0000

Vista is not an upgrade :)

They should throw old stuff away and replace it with Macs (even priciest Macs for entire White House won't make a dent in national budget, it's less than 0.0000001% of the bailout :)

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

Ben Langfeld — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 08:50:00 -0000

If they all had Macs in use before taking office, why didn't they just ship them all in to the White House on Tuesday?

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

MIchael Brian Bentley — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 07:32:00 -0000

I believe there's at least one corporation being run on Macs today that just yesterday announced a record quarter. Consider how well the rest of the computing industry is doing, with local giant Microsoft notably announcing a layoff, I'd say that the Obama team appears to have chosen a very competitive formula that gives them an edge. Apple is making it happen for them. It is interesting to me that the transition team apparently doesn't have a way to give the IT folks early access to WH facilities to see what they're in for. I'd be able to work with w2k and related infrastructure well enough to transition from it smoothly, I'm a multiplatform guy, but here's an entire team all set to run IT for the new administration, now in charge, used to making things happen their way, seeing what's available for the first time...I would have been delighted to be there to see that!

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 06:59:00 -0000

Whatever job they can do on Vista can be done on XP. The problem is the end user doesn't know how to use the computer.

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

aalaap — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 06:57:00 -0000

They could skip it all and upgrade to Windows 7 directly. They won't even have to spend any money on it. :-)

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

Eric — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 06:35:00 -0000

I'd be a lot more curious if those machines are current on their security patches than what OS they're running.

Personally I'm more shocked that computer infrastructure apparently isn't more of a non-political position so that there is carryover between administrations. Also shocked that they were surprised by this. There wasn't some kind of transition staff to train them to what they'd be walking into?

These things bother me far more than whether they run this OS or that one.

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

sammybaby — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 06:29:00 -0000

This writeup is a bit misleading - the actual article is about much more wide-anging issues than just "Mac users stuck with Windows software" For example:

"One White House official, who arrived breathless yesterday after being held up at the exterior gate, found he had no computer or telephone number. Recently called back from overseas duty, he ended up using his foreign cellphone.

Another White House official whose transition cellphone was disconnected left a message temporarily referring callers to his wife's phone. "

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

ttuttle — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 06:22:00 -0000

If this is the worst of it (if it's true), then it's not too bad, relatively speaking. When Bush took office in 2001, they found about $200K in damages and vandalism from the previous (Clinton) administration staff. I don't recall all the problems, but one of the reported issues was a whole room of computers with the "W" key pried off.

6 year old software or not. Cheers to at least having adults in the Whitehouse now.

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

CanadaGood — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 06:22:00 -0000

Not sure why White House would want a bunch of mobile laptops going out the door every afternoon with official documents on them. Desktop workstations are called desk-top for a reason.
In a corporate environment -- speaking from experience -- it is expensive to upgrade and fraught with security perils. Hopefully the US Gov in all its branches has some basic computer hardware purchasing standards. No reason why they should give every White House employee expensive MacBooks unless they are going to do the same for every employee of the FBI, NSA, IRS, etc, etc.
Most large organizations have an art or publicity department with a few macs, but I have not seen an office environment that runs mainly Apple software. (Yes, I am sure that they exist, I just have not seen them).

Re: Obama's Mac-savvy team lands in Microsoft hell at White House

Someon — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 05:27:00 -0000

Uhmnn this story is actually not factual. I know for a fact that O and his transition team are using Dell D630 Laptops with Windows XP before they came into the White House. His public speech writer is using a Mac and so might be some other people.

But overall they are all on XP.