InfoWorld's Chad Dickerson has the nerve to question the practicality of supporting OS X in a small shop and the Mac faithful took him to task. Give me a break guys! The fact is that getting all the pieces to work together in even a relatively small IT environment can be difficult. Legacy systems, PC-only applications, and even IE-based Web applications all take their toll. There's only so much money and so many hours in a day.

Making a Mac work in a PC-friendly world is doable, but there are pitfalls all along the way. A small example: just the other day, my research group nearly missed a meeting with our sponsor because they sent out the invitation from Outlook. Yes, iCal can read them, but a glitch, the details of which are unimportant, caused it to hiccup. I think the benefits of having my research group using Macs outweighs the problems, but there are problems and you have to be pretty hearty to make it work.

Attacking Chad as "not pure enough" isn't going to advance the world of Macs and pointing out to him the obvious solutions that he already knows about won't help either. What will help? Continue to make the Mac compelling and then adapters will be created for legacy apps, more applications will be built for both platforms and fewer IE-only Web applications will be deployed.