“As further evidence of the growing interest in Macs among enterprise customers, IBM’s Research Information Services launched an internal pilot program designed to study the possibility of moving significant numbers of employees to the Mac platform. The study has already found an enthusiastic response from participants and is helping to drive Mac support for IBM’s business applications,” Daniel Eran Dilger reports for Roughly Drafted.
“A summary of the pilot program, detailed in a IBM document obtained by RoughlyDrafted, revealed that IBM is actively working to move away from its dependence upon Microsoft Windows and toward a heterogeneous cross-platform future,” Dilger reports. “‘In line with IBM’s external strategy of offering a true ‘Open Client’ that may be Windows, Linux or a Mac,’ the document noted, ‘Research IS is focusing on providing an IBM application stack on multiple Operating Systems, rather than be confined to one or the other.'”
Dilger reports, “The pilot program document outlined a series of reasons for evaluating MacBook Pro laptops as a replacement for the Windows-based ThinkPads currently in use inside the company:”
• Alternative to Microsoft Windows
• Less prone to security issues
• Widely used in the academic world with which Research has close ties
• Many new hires are more comfortable with the Mac and lately asking for it
• Growing Mac community in Research and within IBM that finds the development environment on Mac more convenient
• Growing acceptance of the Mac as a consumer and business oriented client platform
• WPLC strategy includes significant investments in achieving the Mac platform parity
Dilger reports, “The first phase of the pilot program ran from October 2007 through January 2008. It distributed 24 MacBook Pros to researchers at different sites within IBM Research… When asked if they would rather keep their MacBook Pro or return to using their familiar ThinkPad, only three chose the ThinkPad; the rest decided to keep the Mac laptop.”
Find out what the researchers had to say about their Macs, learn about IBM’s plans to expand the program this year, and more here.
Wow… This is great. Good for IBM. And a great follow-up from the discussion yesterday.
Open Source is a cancer.
Too bad that the pilot program document didn’t list ‘Macs can run Mac OS X, Windoze, and/or Linux’ as one of it’s bullet points… oh well, maybe they’re just not aware of it yet.
2 minutes combined with months and months of research and sandbagging your find until an appropriate event. Meanwhile, millions of Windows PCs are spamming us all right now and their owners are even aware that they’re doing it.
their owners **aren’t** aware
Too bad IBM CPU’s are no longer inside. Too bad for IBM, that is. Apple seems to be doing great since the Intel switch.
The door is opening more and more ….
What’s to say that at some point in the future, as well as choosing which OS you boot into, there won’t be an option to choose which processor you use too?
People once thought Apple would be tied to IBM processors forever, then the ‘Star Trek’ project heralded the switch to Intel – maybe at some point in the future there’ll be a switch back to IBM, or the option of choosing which processor you buy with your Mac, or options to use chips from either company in multi-processor machines..?
Only Steve and the Apple Skunk Works knows what might happen in the future…
Fools. The once mighty IBM is slipping further into irrelevance. If this initiative continues they’re going to have to call themselves ITM for ‘International Toy Machines’. If the enterprise could make use of overpriced proprietary toys like MACs they would have done it already.
Perhaps the most disturbing line is this:
…IBM is actively working to move away from its dependence upon Microsoft Windows and toward a heterogeneous cross-platform future.
I, for one, am tired of all this talk of “cross-platform and “interoperability”. You don’t need it. Microsoft makes the whole widget: a brilliant OS + a magnificent office productivity suite for a reasonable price. There’s no reason to look elsewhere. I suggest the many Windows fans at ITM (formerly IBM) unite with their intelligent and courageous IT departments to stop the insanity. That or it’s time to update your resume.
Your potential. Our passion.™
“When asked if they would rather keep their MacBook Pro or return to using their familiar ThinkPad, only three chose the ThinkPad;”
Fire them, they’re morons!
@ZuneTang
LMAO. You’re very funny. But Thurrott goes one better: he can say battier things and actually _mean_ them … or if he doesn’t he hopes his readers do at any rate.
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Zune, needs and very large enema!
MDN word, “fact”
What about Intel do the same. By the way, they’re Apple’s partner!
Not to mention that “Thinkpads” are now Lenovo, not IBM. So there is less home turf to protect for IBM, enabling the company to more rationally consider the options.
It’s interesting that though Mac’s have ‘moved’ to Intel processors, because of the universal binary even Leopard can still run on G4 and G5. The big problem that caused the switch is that the people making the PowerPC chips were more interested in imbedded hardware sales then Mac sales, the move didn’t hurt IBM, and gave Mac’s more freedom. (Side note, employed for a major company working on aircraft instrumentation, the majority of the equipment that displays or processes information does so with a PowerPC chip, G5’s mostly)
It’d be interesting to see Mac’s move to a middle ground, where some systems use Intel and others PowerPC. Could you imagine Leopard running on a Cell processor? (uses a PowerPC chip as it’s central CPU, and Cell’s are based off of PowerPC as well).
What a slap in M$’s face!
Time for a change!
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Hahahaha Zune Tang is back! Welcome!…..
But Seriously, no one believes you.
The times they are a-changing!
Old times, remember:
“Nobody got fired for buying IBM”
Remember Montezuma’s Revenge? Well, welcome to Steve’s revenge.
All this is borderline funny, hehehe!
“…IBM is actively working to move away from its dependence upon Microsoft Windows and toward a heterogeneous cross-platform future.”
Let’s remember, heteros have rights too.
Yes, one wonders what took them so long. You’d think they would have done this years ago when Macs were running on PowerPC chips not to mention the fact that they got the shaft from Microsoft.
Ditto for MOTO.
Apple had their “Marklar” project (as alluded to by Bartsimpsonhead above) up and running to keep an Intel version of OS X in development. I wonder if they will do the same for the PowerPC platform once they “officially” drop support for it?
ZT … it took a second, but I got it. “ intelligent and courageous IT departments to stop the insanity” … it almost slipped by me. Almost ‘lol’ … but, I’m a hard sell. DID smile. 😀
About the conversion … they really only need to make one conversion – to *nix. That brings in all the Enterprise/IT flavors as well as the wanna-be Apple. Red Hat, HP, Sun, Ubuntu, they are all there already. Apple deserves to be, but isn’t. With this, they CAN be.
Oh, and I discovered a way to export from Outlook to Mac – not MS approved of course – one less barrier to worry about.
Ampar, remember that a “heterogeneous cross-platform” has more options than a homo-genius cross dresser!
Who would have thought 5 or 10 years ago that IBM would be moving toward using Macs rather than Windows.
Maybe in another 5 or 10 years, when MS has butchered its operating system and sold it off to some Asian firm we will read an article about how Redmond is running a pilot program to evaluate moving to the Mac platform.