“Soon after Michele Goins became chief information officer at Juniper Networks in February, she decided to respond to the growing chorus of Mac lovers among the networking company’s 6,100 employees. For years, many had used Apple’s computers at home and clamored for them in the office as well. So she launched a test, letting 600 Juniper staffers use Macs instead of the standard-issue PCs that run Microsoft’s Windows operating system. As long as the extra support costs aren’t too high, she plans to open the floodgates. ‘If we opened it up today, I think 25% of our employees would choose Macs,’ she says,” Peter Burrows reports for BusinessWeek.
“Funny thing is, she has never received a single sales call from Apple. While thousands of other companies scratch and claw for the tiniest sliver of the corporate computing market, Apple treats this vast market with utter indifference,” Burrows reports.
“Once an object of devotion for students and artists, the Mac is becoming the first choice of many. Surging demand for the machines led Apple to predict revenues will rise 33% in the second quarter, to $7.2 billion, even in the face of an economic slowdown,” Burrows reports.
“What’s less obvious is that the enthusiasm is starting to spill over into the corporate market. It’s a people’s revolution, of sorts, with workers increasingly pressing their employers to let them use Macs in the office. In a survey of 250 diverse companies that has yet to be released, the market research firm Yankee Group found that 87% now have at least some Apple computers in their offices, up from 48% two years ago,” Burrows reports.
“IBM and Cisco Systems are running similar tests on whether to let Macs into the office. Google ( has allowed employees pick their machine of choice for years,” Burrows reports. “Others are sure to follow suit.”
“Apple is getting help from an unlikely rival: Microsoft. Vista, the latest version of the software giant’s Windows operating system, looks like it could turn out to be one of the great missteps in tech history. Not only does it lack compelling new features, but analysts say Vista requires companies to buy more expensive PCs, incur hefty training costs, and to deal with maddening glitches,” Burrows reports. “Certainly, Apple’s ad team seems to smell blood. Most of the company’s ‘I’m a Mac’ [sic: “Get a Mac”] ads are aimed at taking Vista’s rep even lower, including one in which a yoga instructor gets stressed out about how Vista screwed up her billing system.”
MacDailyNews Take: Burrows then offers a highly perplexing assessment of Apple’s Mac prospects in large companies:
Apple will find it more difficult to gain ground in large companies…there are software limitations. Some industrial-grade programs won’t run on Macs, including the popular software from Germany’s SAP that companies use to run everything from operations to sales. Getting Microsoft’s Exchange e-mail to run on the Apple machines is often a huge hassle, which makes them a nonstarter in some offices.
MacDailyNews Take: Why are we highly perplexed? Because right in the previous paragraph Burrows just explained:
Since Apple adopted Intel’s microprocessors as the brains of its computers in 2006, Macs have been able to run Windows just like any Intel-based PC. In addition, Macs can run what’s known as “virtualization” software, which lets people use the Mac operating system and Windows at the same time and switch easily between them.
MacDailyNews Take: A Mac booted into Windows is just a nice-looking piece of hardware running Microsoft’s bloated, upside-down and backwards, bad copy of the Mac OS. Slumming it with Windows, it temporarily ceases to be a Mac; it is just an Apple-branded PC running an inferior OS. It runs SAP’s software, Microsoft’s Outlook, and anything else any other Windows PC runs just the same, thanks. And, by the way, Apple Inc. is a very large company, with approximately 21,600 full-time employees plus an additional 2,100 temporary employees located in offices all around the world, and they all use Macs; because Apple never shortsightedly shackled themselves to proprietary Microsoft “solutions” that always attempt to force the use of Windows. Macs can run large businesses. Here are a couple of other examples: Japan’s Aozora Bank dumps 2,300 Windows PCs for Apple Macs – April 03, 2006, Largest automobile processing company in North America dumps Windows PCs for Apple Macs – July 16, 2007
Burrows continues, “Demographic trends may be on Apple’s side. All those college kids wielding iPods have created a deep pool of potential Mac users. According to a survey of 1,200 undergrads by researcher Student Monitor this year, 43% of college students who intend to buy a laptop plan to buy a Mac, up from 8% in 2003. ‘Many of today’s technology decision-makers will ultimately be replaced by Mac users,’ says Eric Weil, managing partner of Student Monitor.”
There is much more in the full article – recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “qka” for the heads up.]
LOL! MaLvado, Big Oil has never lost money. It’s only compared to today’s obscene profits that the 90’s don’t look as good as they did back then.
I agree with @Screw the Enterprise, Apple used to have a corporate enterprise department in the early 90’s when Jobs was ousted. When his Steveness came back, among the things he did was put an end to the cloners and consolidated Apples focus in 2 markets, education and consumer and absorbed the separate business division by by refocusing them on higher education.
By making high end quality products businesses that need the high end power stayed with Apple, graphic arts, broadcasting, technical publications. Eventually as Apple built faster and faster machines during the clock cycle wars of the early 2000’s research scientist inexpensive in prestigious US universities put together clusters of G5 to create supercomputers for simulations that previously were out of their reach before.
When Apple went to Intel Processors it did 2 things; the first was to lower it’s cost of doing business by tapping into the vast PC component commodity market, the second was to create boot camp to allow people that are forced to use PC’s at work … make it easier for them to buy and use a more reliable product from Apple at home. Apple tapped into MicroSoft’s and Enterprise’s weakness in the need for an IT department to maintain their infrastructure security and upgrades.
I believe that Apple still is not courting the Enterprise market. They do tend to want everything for next to nothing. I used to work for one that grew from $10 M to $1.4B over 12 years. The attention that apple is getting from corporate offices is due to a confluence of things. The few corporate executive and middle managers that apple scored at home no doubt discovered Apple’s greater ROI the technical barriers were dropped and IT support was not needed and their products just worked without a lot of hand holding.
I believe that Apple is doing the right thing in holding the corporate market in abeyance rather than actively seeking it out with specially designed custom PC , lower or differ for corporate only price structures and special tech support departments . Such unnecessary departments add costs and the profits usually aren’t worth it. See Dell. Innovation costs to bring to the market and Apple has always been the highest percentage of gross income investor in R and D. This helps Apples bottom line by creating product improvement across it’s entire line and allowing Apple to not allow corporate purchasing and volume discounts to erode margin and product quality. So I too say “Screw Enterprise ” pay your fair share like the rest of us you will find it cheaper in the long run.
I work in a medium sized company with a little over 500 employees. We are spread out in six locations in four cities in three states. We do about $100 million a year in revenue.
While I know of several employees that have Macs at home, I am the only person in the entire org’ that uses a Mac for “work.” I have a lot of flexibility in what I do and a lot of say in what kind of computer I can use. I am very fortunate in that way.
Kind of like SAP, our biz is tied to a near monoplolistic mainframe/server system vendor that (thank the Maker) is unix based but only has clients for it (sophisticated telnet app) on Windoze. The same goes for their CRM system which is web based. It only works on IE, not even Firefox for windoze. It has a lot of active x and other crap like that that only IE for windoze can discern. Thankfully for virtualization I can do the bit that I need to in that world and happily live the rest of it in OS X. Luckily we are, surprisingly, not big enough or set up to really need something like an Exchange server, but we are starting to think maybe we are. Luckily, the head IT person does NOT want to go the exchange router when we upgrade. I have at least been able to say, let’s wait until iPhone 2.0 comes out and then get something that will play nice with them that’s not exchange. Read on for the reason why.
I do have to live in my own little world and if I didn’t know how to configure, say, a static ip address and other minor tech stuff like that I’d be hosed. There wouldn’t be any support available for me with the IT people. Of course, since putting my foot down about three years ago, I’ve never had a problem. I even take some “support” calls from people about windoze.
As much as I would love to see more Macs in our biz, it’s not even on the radar picking up stuff that is not on the radar. We were just looking at purchasing about 50 more computers from the kind folks in China by way of Round Rock/Austin for a new location. Every dollar that can be spared is. Plus, we wouldn’t have any support for any kind of Mac. We’re talking not even having DVD-capable drives in computers. On a other note, we are one of those that would have to spend, we figured, about $400 more per machine to have them be able to run Vista. The end of 2008 will suck in that regard when we can’t get XP, but even that won’t be able to have Macs be on the radar that picks up the radar. The Vista ready machines would still be a couple hundred bucks cheaper than the cheapest iMac and that’s before having to buy a windoze license to run that stuff that we would have to on them.
There are a lot of the typical forces in place that might be able to move some businesses to Macs thru other influences: there are several “C” level and upper management people that have picked up iPhones (I was the first of those on 6/29/07), but alas b/c of reasons mentioned above Macs aren’t even on the radar of the radar.
There is even some movement from the very top. The CEO’s son (I am very influential in their purchases) got a MacBook in January, the CEO’s wife got a MacBook Air last month and for his couple of home offices, the big man himself is probably going to get some 24″ iMacs – a lot of which was spurred by his admiring mine. Even with this, there are still insurmountable obstacles (at this point) to any kind of wide adoption of Macs in our biz.
Apple will never be able to “get them all” and I think there will always be some places where they won’t be able to fit in. I could see a few more one-off people in our org’ that got Macs for “work” but nothing on any kind of large scale.
I guess I am ok with that, though.
What never ceases to amaze me is that people don’t understand that Apple does not go after the enterprise entirely for strategic reasons. Microsoft is very successful in the business market, but terrible with consumers. Apple can be very successful in both, but it has chosen the consumer market because it really has no competition competition. Sorry, the likes of Nokia and Sony cannot be considered formidable.
But the potential for the consumer market is far larger than the enterprise market. If Apple ever went after the enterprise market, you can expect His Monkeyness to not just throw chairs, but also billions in a war with Apple.
If Apple were to take on Microsoft now, it would be a very costly battle. As Apple becomes more powerful in the consumer market, it becomes an easier battle to fight.
Why do you think Apple doesn’t spend its relatively large cash hoard? Armageddon hasn’t begun yet.
Didn’t SAP announce they were coming out (or maybe even have) with a Mac version of their software?
Macs work great in the enterprise. I’ve been balking the establishment and running my own mac in the office for 10 years. Most corporate applications work on the mac natively, some require virtualization, but it can be done.
Making exchange work on the mac is childs play. The only applications that I require vmware or parallels on are edge cases. Those who suggest 100% of the group run substandard software which impacts productivity, because 1% of the user base need to use a legacy application 1% of the time don’t understand IT. The job of IT is to select the best tools at reasonable cost for most of the user base to be productive.
Consider the edge application that doesn’t have any way to run on a mac…by comparison the graphics department uses its tools more often and most of the IT users don’t have any use or need for the super duper advanced features. The reality is perhaps that edge application should be re-architected for open standards.
I’ve said it before a million times. The people who bash the mac have never used one or interfaced with one. They scream the same old tired arguement meanwhile Apple has quietly made the necessary changes. Macs integrate with Active Directory. Macs can share on CIFS networks. Macs use standard TCP networking. Macs can use exchange mail, I do it every day have have for years. Macs have many many ways to run Internet Explorer. Macs usually have a native means to do most anything…again edge cases require virtualization such as WINE, parallels, or vmware. Most users simply don’t have the need for this however.
In most companies I’ve worked for we created email distribution lists where novice mac users ask for help from experienced mac users. In most cases people require help with setup…and once they do you never hear from them again except to let others know they found a cool new app. I’ve worked at my company for 7 months now and only asked IT for help once…because the permissions on my home directory were incorrectly configured. That call would have occurred on PC or Mac. We’ve created wiki pages for people to configure their systems with step by step directions. Basic configuration questions have pretty much stopped as a result.
The only reason IT minions continue to push PC down the user throats is because we might need a few less minions. You’ll hear a million reasons why the mac isn’t suitable from these people…but very few of these reasons have merit. Most of them are old, baseless, and preached by people who have never used one. In my book that is the purest form of ignorance.
Not too many companies who’ve done internal cost studies have found macs increase cost. Usually TCO goes down, way down. User productivity usually goes up, way up. The user base is usually more happy. It then can stop hiring an army to support desktops and divert those costs to doing things which actually make money for the company…such as work on many needed re-designs of the core services…where there is usually a huge lack of talent and money to address the problems.
the new MBP 17 rocks