“UBS’s Steve Milunovich today reiterates a Buy rating on shares of Apple, and a $125 price target, writing that the company should benefit from a turning of the tide in technology, whereby consumer purchasing, especially that driven by brand affinity, now matters more than traditional corporate IT purchasing that drove the PC cycle,” Tiernan Ray reports for Barron’s.
Selling computers to companies used to be the place to be. Corporations could afford and in fact required complex hardware, software, and services. Barriers to switching vendors were provided by operating system lock-in as well as system admin training. Technology often trickled down from the office to the home, extending Wintel’s domination and HP’s printer franchise… Consumer electronics becoming more attractive. Corporate vendors appear weaker with the cloud and open source reducing vendor lock-in. Customization, upon which IBM built large margins, is giving away to infrastructure standardization. Consumer technology has taken the lead in trends like mobility that are driven bottom up. Consumer markets are now larger. – UBS analyst Steve Milunovich
Read more in the full article here.‘
MacDailyNews Take:
The real problem for Mac and Linux is that many organizations have sold their souls to Microsoft by creating and/or using Windows-only programs and developing Internet Explorer-only web apps. Unfortunately many companies have so shackled themselves to Windows, they have no idea how to even begin to extricate themselves. Of course, since Macs can also run Windows, Apple has given them the ability to transition at their own pace if – and this is a very big “if,” as job security and staffing levels are a concern to the IT types – if they will accept Apple’s gift of freedom.
Note to CEOs: your IT department should not be making final hardware and software purchasing decisions. They should be supporting your company’s technology needs. You should get independent viewpoints (find people who recommend Macs and make them explain why) and retain the decision-making role for yourselves. Don’t settle for Windows-only shackles. A marked increase in productivity and reliability for your company is there for the taking. You can get Macs and seamlessly integrate them into your business – even if all you do at first is run Windows on them. You can explore Mac OS X and better ways of doing things according to your own timeline (hint: start by using Keynote instead of PowerPoint for your presentations and watch your audiences perk up). Just don’t expect your IT people to ever recommend Apple, as they may have ulterior motives for sticking with Microsoft. – MacDailyNews Take, January 2, 2007
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Tayster” for the heads up.]