Roger Ehrenberg, writing for SeekingAlpha, challenges conventional thinking about Apple’s prospects in the enterprise and assesses the Mac’s threat to PC-based platforms over time as being “increasingly acute.”
“I know from my own experience in my company how this transformation takes place,” Ehrenberg writes.
“We started out being a Dell/Intel/Windows XP Professional-based shop. Then our developers needed better machines, several of whom had Macs at home, and requested hi-test Mac machines for development. They loved them. Told everyone. Then anybody doing graphics/visualization wanted a Mac. Then anybody in a client-facing role who did presentations, online demos, etc. wanted one. Now pretty much everybody has one. It has become ‘the’ supported platform in my company. And it happened in a stealthy, inside-out way, where a core of passionate Mac users got the ball rolling, showed others how awesome it was after which people were beating a path to my desk asking for one,” Ehrenberg writes.
“So change can happen quickly within SMEs. Yeah, we’re not talking about Deutsche Bank going Mac tomorrow, but as the PC user experience degrades and/or requires new hardware, and as more and more grass-roots Mac users begin speaking up, some change – material change – will invariably take place,” Ehrenberg writes.
MacDailyNews Take: We might not be talking about Deutsche Bank, but we could just as well be talking Japan’s Aozora Bank, which last year dumped 2,300 Windows PCs for Apple Macs. (See also: Boom! Largest automobile processing company in North America dumps Windows PCs for Apple Macs – July 16, 2007 and Wilkes University to dump all Windows PCs, replace with Apple Macs – February 22, 2007)
Ehrenberg continues, “I saw this movie with the Blackberry phone. Early adopters were supported by IT in a one-off, kluge way, told others how awesome the device was, a wall of demand was created, and finally the Wall Street firms caved and properly supported the device on an enterprise-wide basis. The same thing can happen with the Mac. And don’t tell me that change can’t happen and that Apple is out of the enterprise game. Because it can. And because it’s not. Really.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Patrice” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Note: The recipe produces the same delicious results for iPhone, too.