Celebrity CIO evaluates alternatives to Windows

Our CIO, CJ Rayhill, sent a pointer to an interesting article in CIO magazine, which describes how John Halamka, CIO of the Harvard Medical School and CareGroup, which runs the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, evaluated Mac OS X and Linux as alternatives to Windows:

After three months of experimentation and comparison,
Halamka concluded that his dream machine is a Dell D420 notebook that runs OS X. Unfortunately, such a machine doesn’t currently exist out of the box.

He prefers Dell’s hardware over Apple’s because it weighs 3 pounds less than the 5-pound MacBook he toted around for a month, and it emits far less heat. “[That’s] the only thing preventing me from using the Mac,” he says.

He prefers OS X’s security, reliability and simple user interface over that of XP. And though he still has high hopes for running a version of Linux that is reliable and full-featured, he hasn’t found an OS that’s up to the task. (He says that SUSE on the Lenovo T60 may be the answer, since it will be the first commercial laptop with Linux configured and supported by the manufacturer.) But until Apple develops a lighter-weight laptop or decides to license its software for installation on other machines, Halamka is sticking with XP on his D420 for professional use. For personal use, he’s keeping the MacBook. Having two computers—one for work and one for play—is a change for Halamka, who used one computer for both prior to this experiment….

Although he has no immediate plans to replace any Windows desktops with Macs, Halamka says he’s going to watch the price and performance of Apple’s newest OS, Leopard, which Apple is scheduled to release in spring 2007. If Leopard offers better administration tools than OS X and is more tightly integrated both with Outlook and with Microsoft’s Exchange server, Halamka would be more inclined to initiate the broader use of Macs. He would want such improvements to ensure that Leopard users won’t encounter as many of the problems he ran into accessing his Outlook calendar and delegation functions.

CJ added: “This is also what I’m hearing from my other CIO friends as well…”