“When it comes to the question of PCs versus Macs, the enterprise looks much more like the button-down John Hodgman than the comfortable Justin Long – the two actors in Apple’s popular ad campaign. But Apple Inc. has been gaining ground. In a survey of corporate desktop operating system trends published in August 2008, Forrester Research found that since October 2006, use of Apple products among its clients had grown from 1.1 to 4.5 percent,” Merrill Douglas reports for Government Technology.
“Among computer users at large, the Cupertino, Calif., company is doing even better. Apple claimed 9.5 percent of the U.S. personal computer market in the third quarter of 2008, according to figures released in October 2008 by Gartner. That’s a 29 percent increase over 2007,” Douglas reports.
“”It’s actual users bringing those technologies in, rather than the IT department bringing them in,” said Charles Smulders, managing vice president of Gartner’s End User Client Computing Group,” Douglas reports. “A growing trend toward ‘consumerization’ in the workplace has seen more employees asking for the IT products they prefer, or simply bringing in products they buy themselves. ‘That has given rise to a greater number of Apple products being part of the enterprise ecosystem,’ Smulders said.”
“Washington, D.C., is deploying [Apple’s iPhones] in several pilot implementations. ‘Most of what government does is in the public domain,’ said Vivek Kundra, the district’s chief technology officer (CTO). Applications that use publicly available data are right for the iPhone, he added,” Douglas reports.
“The district started testing iPhone applications after a local resident submitted one to the Apps for Democracy competition. Contestants were invited to create applications using data feeds from the district’s Data Catalog, which offers public information on everything from juvenile arrests and transit schedules to recent road kill pickups,” Douglas reports. “Police officers, teachers and employees in the Office of the CTO (OCTO) have been experimenting with the iPhones… The consumerist ethos also has persuaded OCTO to make Macs available to city employees who want them.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
