Mac Making Inroads in Corporate Computing? People are Waking Up
I’ve long believed that one needs to expect the “impossible,” and if events in the financial markets over the past several months teach us anything is that the impossible is not only possible, it is inevitable. Consider corporate use of the Mac. This idea has been pooh-poohed at every turn, and such dismissive, pedestrian analysis by “analysts” has simply blown my mind. In fact, I wrote a post about six months ago titled Apple and the Enterprise: In 20 Years, “Who Would Have Thought…?”, where I challenged conventional thinking about Apple’s prospects in the enterprise and assessed the 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. 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.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. First in small, semi-autonomous groups. Then in larger groups. And then it becomes viral. 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.
My analysis was based upon viral consumer use bleeding into the enterprise, chipping away at existing platforms and demanding new types of support until it becomes a full-fledged, fully-supported alternative.
Fast forward to today: Computerworld ran a story titled Macs on the network: Time to panic?, which approaches the threat to PC supremacy from a similar vantage point as my March 2007 post:
Yet as the consumer market begins to meld with the corporate world
even more, and employees expect to use their preferred gadget (and
operating system) for work and home life, the Mac could make inroads at
large corporations.The facts reveal a coming resurgence. Apple sold 36% more Macs in the second quarter than the same quarter last year. The company has sold more than 1 million iPhones and 110 million iPods to date. There also just seems to be “something in the air” — or at least the blogosphere — suggesting a Mac resurgence. Blogs such as Engadget.com post about Apple constantly, and even IT analyst firms that have usually downplayed the Mac as “niche” are talking about the platform in the corporate world again.
“We expect that much of today’s IT infrastructure is going to be
turned upside down by the invasion of consumer technologies,” said Andrew Jaquith, an analyst at Yankee Group Research Inc. in Boston. “Consumerization is going to make IT’s job harder, and platforms like the Mac are going to become increasingly common, in many cases in spite of the wishes of management.”********************
If Jaquith and others are right, it’s the consumer who will bring the
platform into the corporate world and, it seems, force network managers
to support the operating system.
Consumers driving change in the corporate world. Not really surprising, since corporations are made up of - what? - consumers. And if those consumers have more fulfilling experiences using different types of hardware and software at home than at work, they will push for change at every opportunity. And corporations can only fight against this rising tide for so long, especially when a change might involve extreme short-term pain but bring a host of long-term benefits like better usability, better integration across programs and enhanced stability. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - listen to the people. They know how best to do their jobs and complete their tasks. And the computer of choice for an increasing number of these people is the Mac. And corporate adoption is simply the next logical step of Apple’s growth. How long it takes I don’t know, but this previously impossible thought is nothing if not inevitable.
