(InfoWorld) - By my calculations, based on Steve Jobs’ claim that half of all Macs are sold to first-time buyers, roughly 9,000 people switch to the Mac every day. They’re buying new iMacs, MacBooks, MacBook Pros and Mac Pros, most of which come in at sticker prices of $1,200 and up, plus add-ons. With OS X Leopard and iPhone hitting in June, I expect all hell and hallelujah to knock over those fence-sitting switchers. I’m looking forward to that.

What makes the 9,000 number so impressive is the courage of the users switching from Windows. Let’s face it: Words such as “friendly” and “intuitive” don’t easily tip the scales against “familiar” for professional users who have been running Windows their entire careers. It becomes ingrained that the only roles a platform’s core GUI needs to fulfill are authentication, program launching, and file management. It’s counterintuitive to many professional Windows users that system software should do anything more than that.

I know someone who is of that very mind-set. She has used Windows since 3.0 and has never seen any reason to use anything else. Her computer, she says, is a tool, not a toy (jab); she needs neither a point-and-click nursemaid nor eye candy, and she’s too busy to see how that other half lives just for the sake of broadening her horizons. I can’t argue with any of that. These are the unmistakable words of a hardcore non-switcher.

[Talkback: Mac with virtual Windows hard to resist?]

Nonetheless, I piqued her curiosity when she happened by while I was working a project that brought together the UNIX command line, X Window, Windows, OS X, and Mac application resources. I was running a two-headed Mac Pro, and she said that I made it all look so easy. That’s as much credit as she’s ever given a Mac. I saw in that an opportunity.

Parallels recently made it possible to make an entirely faithful virtual clone of a physical Windows machine, with that clone able to run on either a Mac or a Linux or Windows PC. I offered her a chance to have zero-risk, zero-pressure access to that other half, as she called it, to see how easy she found it to use. Windows would be there, an exact duplicate of her original PC, but behind the OS X Aqua window in which her Windows PC existed, lay a Mac that I wired to give her read-only access to documents on her Windows virtual machine. Beyond that, all I did was prepare for her the briefest of OS X cheat sheets. I put her PC in storage and replaced it with a MacBook wired to her existing LCD panel.

The official start of my study (which you’ll find I am approaching scientifically) was that first moment of discovery. She approached her desk to find her PC and its tangle of cables, along with its noise, gone. I nudged the mouse and her LCD panel lit up with her Windows desktop, only now inside an OS X Aqua window.

I had migrated her to a MacBook, which rested invisibly on her desk with its lid closed. I told her that, if nothing else, she now had a much faster Windows PC for work, and when she needed it, she could take it mobile. I also told her that if she chose to keep using Windows, even indefinitely, I’d make sure that was easy for her. Yet I also explained that I had made it just as easy to explore the Mac platform, and that she couldn’t damage Windows or OS X by experimenting with either one.

Now it’s down to standing back, watching, and discovering what happens when you leave a professional Windows user alone with a Mac. Will she resist? Or will she make the switch? Stay tuned.

(InfoWorld) - Guess this is the big week to write about the Daylight Savings Time snafu. For those who might have missed it, DST starts on March 11 this year -- three weeks earlier than usual -- and ends on November 4, a week later than usual. It's a mite late to be worrying about prepping your systems for the change now, if you ask me. If you're hearing cries of "What do we do?!" from the executive floors feel free to throw a scornful glance or two. Bottom line: If they're complaining now, those guys waited a too long.

Only a couple weeks remain till dooms-time, so what's left to do is painfully obvious. Because there's no time to find or build an all-purpose DST fixit-tool, you're stuck using what you've got. That means using your centralized software management toolbox (if you have one), but it also means double-checking: A software manager such as Microsoft SMS (Systems Management Server) can manage patch deployments for all kinds of apps, but it can't guarantee the patches will be there.

Take a glance at that corporate software portfolio and then tell your hapless intern to Web scan or call each manufacturer and get the lowdown on where the DST patch effort is. Get dates and make sure someone on your staff checks them and makes sure to get those patches in-house. Start that remediation process as soon as you can. After that, make a list of all the manufacturers who answer "Duh, what DST patch?" and plan on managing those changeovers yourself. Tedious, time-consuming, and a real pitfall if you mess it up … so don't. It's not hard, it's just a pain in that fleshy bodily region I'm not supposed to mention by name.

That's all I've got for the DST buzzword. The only other buzzword on everyone's lips is virtualization, mainly because Virtual PC 2007 just became available for free download from the big M. I've got it running on the Gateway E255-M notebook on which I glommed the Vista Business client. The basic package installed on Vista with no trouble. Then I installed Windows XP Pro as a guest operating system — again, no trouble. Dug around a bit and found my Windows 2000 discs and installed that — still no trouble, although the wireless client failed to work. I tore my office apart looking for Windows 98 discs, but all I could find were the MSDN versions and I've long since lost the product keys to those. I suppose I could have checked eBay for some OS/2 Warp disks, but … why?

The rumor mill has it that you can install Fedora Core as a guest OS, but that died hard on my box. I'm not much of a Penguin modifier, though, and the Web says you've got to mod your display drivers, among other things, to get this to run properly, so I gave up pretty quick and went back to watching Patton. Microsoft has made a small deal out of the almost-Linux-compatibility, but I don't see giving the company credit for something it really didn't do. Virtual PC 2007 may be able to manage Fedora with some headaches on my part, but I get enough headaches.

If Redmond won't officially acknowledge the Penguin, and you think you need the Penguin, then forget about Virtual PC 2007. Simple as that. After all, there are other clients out there that can do this with no recourse to Advil whatever. VMware is the big name, and if you use that platform, you won't be sorry. If the VMware price tag bothers you, then check out the Parallels -- between $50 and $80 depending on which version we're talking about, and it supports Windows, Linux, and even OS X in some configurations. I'm using it now, although I'm saving the details of that little venture for future column fodder. Meanwhile, if you're testing Windows software for backwards compatibility, Virtual PC 2007 is fantastic. If you're looking to use your favorite apps on your favorite operating system, look someplace else.

SEE ALSO:

Woo Hoo. I can see bright light at the end of the tunnel. This couple of weeks have been interesting. I will go through some of my experiences next week. But for now the news is that I have got an offer at Accenture Australia. I am excited and can't wait to join the office. The work is related to what I have been mainly engaging now and that is training and training content development. The exciting thing is I am looking forward to working in Melbourne CBD. Working in the CBD is just so lively!

I will be trying both driving in the city and taking public transportation and see how both of them compare to start with. I am excited about blogging my work experiences there, but will find out about what their blog policies are etc. etc. So does anybody else who is reading this blog works at Accenture Melbourne office? If so we can create a bloggers group of our own "Accenture Bloggers Group" if they don't have one already.

This will also be a good chance for me to catch up with people/bloggers working in the CBD. If you want to do so, just ping me and we will organise something up.

More info to follow in coming days and weeks..

(InfoWorld) - A fast close — the ability of a company to complete its accounting cycle and close its books — is more than just a badge of honor for the finance department. It means dollars. The question is, Is your technology getting in the way or is it helping?

The best companies can close in two or three days; the laggards might take as long as 15 days.

At least that was typical until Sarbanes-Oxley. With new audit demands, requirements that the CFO and CEO sign off on the numbers, and additional government reporting regulations, it is not surprising that a recent Business Process Management Initiative survey of about 350 companies said that close times increased by at least a week in 2005, and as much as two weeks last year.

Obviously, companies would like to return to a fast close for a number of reasons.

The No. 1 benefit is that it allows you to get historical information out to your managers quickly. If it is the middle of February before the January figures are distributed, you can’t begin to take action on something for two weeks.

Not only that, but if it takes you 15 days to close, it is likely you are wasting an inordinate amount of administrative resource hours in the process, and that relates right back to costs, says Rob Kugel, senior vice president at Ventana Research.

Assuming the numbers are good, a fast close attracts equity investments before your competitors get their numbers out, adds Trevor Walker, vice president of marketing at Cartesis, an ISV that sells a financial consolidation suite called Cartesis Finance.

“The flow of capital to people buying stock will be more available, and the company will be perceived by the Street as a well-run organization,” Walker says.

Now, let’s go back to the question at hand: Is your technology getting in the way, or is it helping?

If you want to speed up the process by several days or perhaps a week, you need to migrate off legacy systems. Migration is difficult, and many companies think it is too costly, but the business folks need to understand that pulling information from legacy systems introduces tremendous complexity and its own set of costs, according to Ventana’s Kugel.

People in the finance department don’t have any idea what a tangled bowl of spaghetti there is behind the computer systems and how getting it to the screen is a huge effort, Cartesis’ Walker adds.

IT can help by making it clear to the folks in finance where there are bottlenecks in the flow of information necessary to complete the close and to perform the audit. Also, far too many companies are still stuck on spreadsheets, which usually contain far too many errors. Too often, the need to correct those errors ends up driving your close schedule.

If it is not already in place, the No. 1 piece of new software that companies should invest in is financial consolidation software, dumping their spreadsheets in the process, Kugel says.

High-performance hardware helps. For example, Cartesis Finance now runs on HP Integrity servers.

Walker is also a big fan of Microsoft SQL Server 2005, telling me that its automated real-time OLAP mechanism prevents it from having to rely on batch processing.

Getting IT and the finance department working together can help drive the success of your business in subtle ways. If your company hasn’t realized that yet, it is about time it woke up.

(InfoWorld) - Some years ago, I got a job doing network support for the District Attorney’s office in a large city that shall remain nameless. When I arrived, the network was a mess! Malware was rampant, Internet and WAN connections were saturated, and users were constantly complaining about slow computers and network performance. Even so, my attempts to enforce a mindful security policy were met with fierce resistance. The attitude among the legal staff was, “This is my computer and my network; you’re just a computer janitor.”

Worse yet, “to make things easier for everyone,” network access permissions had been set so all home directories were open and available to all network users! That was what the Powers That Be wanted. As a result, investigators’ notes, lawyers’ case reports, research, strategies, and so on were open and unprotected — at least within the network.

But even that wasn’t the worst. One day I visited our cross-town branch office to find that virtually every computer had Napster loaded on it, providing open access to every network hard drive thanks to the default Napster settings. This opened up a security hole big enough for a battleship! When I tried to explain this to the branch’s head attorney, she proclaimed, “I’ll take this stuff off my computer when your boss tells me to!” My boss, the head of IT (who was better at politics than technology) told me, “Well, she can be difficult to deal with. Let them have their toys if it keeps them happy.” I was flabbergasted, but what could I do? I wrote up my concerns and submitted them to my boss in the form of a “cover letter,” designed to cover my behind.

About four months later, the state telecommunications agency (which served as our ISP) got a call from a network security officer in another state, asking “Do you know that the county District Attorney’s network is wide open to anyone with a Napster client?” Things got rapidly unpleasant after that.

For some reason, I was never called to account for the security breach. (Perhaps my boss recalled the cover letter.) Instead, the head of the agency sent a strongly worded memo to the IT office, which I forwarded to all the attorneys. Over the next few weeks I managed to get Napster off all the office computers, although I never succeeded in changing the open-home-directories policy. And while I made a strong attempt to explain to everyone why Napster was dangerous, at least one lawyer who loved sharing his music defended his right to continue doing so with a passionate, hair-splitting argument of the sort that had probably convicted many a miscreant. I knew I was fighting a losing battle; within weeks, unauthorized software started to reappear.

Despite my noble decision to resist saying “I told you so!” (it was so tempting), I was fired about a month later; something about failure to show proper respect to those exalted enough to be attorneys. Of course, it could have been that my boss wasn’t happy with my having a copy of that cover letter, either. I can’t say I regretted leaving. It put me in mind of walking off the Titanic at Cherbourg after doing the lifeboat math.

I’m tempted to say that the lesson here is don’t work for lawyers, but of course I’ve known quite a few good ones. Maybe it’s more about letting technical people set technical policies.