The latest BusinessWeek has discovered that catnip for bloggers, a big cover story about Apple - suggesting that it's making progress into businesses. It starts out with Juniper Networks, which has 6,100 people and is letting 600 use Macs (running OSX, one assumes, though perhaps they'll do Windows via Parallels or Boot Camp), and thinks that up to a quarter might use them if they were allowed to. IBM and Cisco are also considering letting Macs through the door (gasp!). From memory, a number of FBI white hat hackers use Macs when outside their offices.
Interesting. It's always worth noting what David Sobotta - who had the unenviable position of being the government sales chief for Apple, and so only one rung above being the enterprise sales chief for Apple in terms of how much Steve Jobs didn't rank his job - thinks on this. While he hasn't posted on this (at the time of writing), he is now an estate agent (realtor, in US parlance; perhaps Apple government sales is looking more attractive right now), where some jobs just have to be done on Windows because of the tools that are available.
He notes that
While Macs are easy to use and generally reliable, they do on occasion have problems. Sometimes Apple can or will help, but often you turn to the user community for a solution. If you have been in the Mac world, that is a normal thing. In fact it is often easier to get a good solution out of the user community than it is out of Apple.
What I have noticed among my Windows using friends is that they want tech support to do the work. They will wait days for an expert to come try to solve their problems rather than reach out to the user community and ask for help.
The BW story notes that the move towards offices hasn't happened through any effort by Apple.
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.
The reluctance to let Macs in partly stems from not wanting to have to hire someone to do the tech support, it seems. However, when it comes to choices about tech support...
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. About 90% of office workers still use its previous operating system, XP. "Microsoft has let this happen," says David B. Yoffie, a Harvard Business School professor and Intel board member. "They've created a huge opening for Apple."
For the record, back when OS X was released, I was asked (in the context of an interview where I was asking most of the questions) what I thought Apple should do to expand its market. I suggested playing up its Unix underpinnings - since that would interest scientists, who need to do that sort of processing. Certainly, Apple's share of the scientific market has grown since OS X came along, and it did take out some ads in Nature (I'm not claiming to have provided any great insight - if Apple's taking my advice on this stuff, it's either in trouble or needs to fire some marketing people). What's intriguing is that marketing to enterprises never came up.
Question is, will Apple be able to exploit this opening? And does it want to? Enterprises are surly beasts, used to special treatment for the huge amounts of money they lavish. It would certainly change Apple if it had to give out product roadmaps in the detail that enterprises would demand for any large-scale, long-term purchasing.
