Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Apple as a server company

Author:Peter Janick
Posted:5/1/1999; 8:28:50 PM
Topic:Linux' wide open spaces
Msg #:5517 (In response to 5505)
Prev/Next:5516 / 5518

I am a Radiologist and part owner in a billing company. I also have an appointment at the local Medical School and sit on the Hospital Information Committee overseeing a $2-3M budget. Also I am responsible for overseeing a $4.7M Picture Archiving & Communication System (PACS)to take our hospital filmless. I use Frontier to solve problems. I constructed an "extranet" for our Corp for discussion pages, scheduling, vacation requests etc. It works great, runs on a Mac, never crashes and takes virtually no maintenance. I thought it would take me a 6 months to create but it only took 2 months and exceeded my wildest expectations. I built a simple prototype Image distribution system with frontier and worked for a while on automating creation of slides from Radiographs which never quite came to fruition. I take reports from our Hospital information system parse the data and stuff "real" databases using Frontier. Now I am working on a digital requisitioning & order entry system for our PACS system which communicates with the hospital information system via a ODBC interface. Because of IT phobia I decided not to base it on the Mac but instead on Windows (no platform specific code yet). This decision has doubled my work for marginal improvements in speed due to perplexing NT networking and installation headaches.

I certainly don't mean to be confrontational. I want Userland to thrive because I have too much personally invested in Frontier to see it disappear. This time last year I was apoplectic when Frontier was in jeopardy. I understand my question was somewhat retorical but look to your income streams and by all means use that to determine where to allocate your resources. If your Mac users are not generating that much revenue for you then blow them off. I'll limp along with frontier on windows or linux - it will just cost me more time and money.



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