New Zealand Online Apple Store Runs On Windows

by , 9:00 AM EDT, April 28th, 2004

Apple may need to have a discussion with its New Zealand distributor, Renaissance. The New Zealand edition of ComputerWorld is reporting that the brand new online Apple Store for New Zealand is running on Windows IIS server, and not Mac OS X Server. The online stores that Apple owns and operates, including the US Apple Store, use WebObjects running on Mac OS X Server. The New Zealand online store, however, is owned and operated by Apple's local distributor, the above-mentioned Renaissance. From ComputerWorld:

"Conduit is hosting the site for us. The site look and feel is running on Mac but the ERP system we run is hosted by Conduit as well so to tie the site in to the system it has to run like this."

[...]

"It uses SQL Server in the back end and the pages are written in ASP. If we wanted to change that over at a later date to PHP, which Apple uses, there's no problem with that whatsoever."

Johnston also points to Conduit's lack of expertise in the Macintosh arena as an issue, despite Conduit having been set up by Renaissance to serve its IT infrastructure needs.

"To be perfectly honest the guys at Conduit didn't have enough experience to develop the site entirely on an Apple. They are putting some of their people through extensive training so if I decide in the future to put the site over to Apple we can."

There's more information in the full article at ComputerWorld, and we recommend it as an interesting read.

The Mac Observer Spin:

Ouch. Apple has no control over this situation, but that doesn't make it any less embarrassing. We've little doubt that a few Wintel-partisans will be all too happy to jump on this.

Then again, the only folks likely to have even the slightest interest in this are online geeks (like us), and online geeks are already part-and-parcel partisans in one camp or another. The real world will never even notice this story. This isn't the same thing as if Apple running its site on Windows, or how Microsoft actually did, at one time, run many of its mail servers on Unix.

Computerworld Article