Macs in Business

Might be ok for small business but I don't see large enterprises adopting Apple in mass. Google is the exception but then again Google has billions and billions and even millions of dollars in resources. They also have a large dev staff to develop any custom tools they might need.

Apple just doesn't have the vertical tools that Microsoft has to deploy, maintain, secure, and support large enterprise, yet. What's big enterprise going to do reserver a Genius appointment when their iPad breaks?

Additionally, Apple simply can't produce as many of the devices business are looking for. Not saying that they're not trying to just stating it as fact. Could a large enterprise put in an order for a thousand iPads rights now? I doubt it.

So, small business yes large enterprise... not yet

First Apple products are in big business and more so in smaller businesses. In big business you generally would need a solid justification for moving off the standard platform.

Smaller businesses are a totalky different animal and you will often find Macs there. In part i think this is due to looking at the bigger picture. That is a corporate IT department controls its budget without consideration for the people it serves. A smaller business may look at the bigger picture and say how does the employee do his job and how best can we support that with computing hardware.

IPhone and iPad really have blurred things here though. The iPhone really is a tool that corporate people can leverage extensively. So you will see that support for the iPhone came on rapidly and extensively in the corporate world.

As to Mac software i think you need to look around a bit. There is actually a lot of good business software out there for the Mac. Just because you haven't seen such software doesn't mean it doesnt exist.

Mac has numerious benefits for use it in a business. Because of the solid programming of the Mac, you will find that there is significantly less downtime involved with repair, reprogramming, reformatting etc. Mac has new ways to increase productivity and profits of the business and it also saves your time also. Macs in business environments, having put together an official guide to implementing Mac security to conform to federal requirements.

You make it sound like million is more than a billion? Perhaps you meant to switch that around?

I think Macs are great for small businesses (which may be from a one-man shop to 1000 employees), but I don't see Macs being adopted by many companies larger than that and I don't think Apple is really interested in the large enterprise market. It seems Apple is content to let Dell, Acer, Lenovo and HP, etc. duke it out with their $300~$500 PC's.

Fortunately, I work in a small company (around 40 employees) and we're completely Mac, so that's cool but I've worked in much a larger company (over 3,000 employees) and it was mostly PC's. To large companies, using the cheapest PC's available is one of the best ways to keep costs down short of laying people off.

Adopted is a strange word! Macs are certainly used by large corporations, maybe not as the primary computer but certainly in some aspects they are popular. More so now that companies are learning the dangers of homogeneous networks of computers. It doesn't take much these days to shut down an entire facility with a virus or other malware on Windows machines.

A more balanced selection of hardware can go a long ways to eliminating these issues. Frankly that is why Linux is gaining ground as it allows for servers that don't have the same vulnerability as Windows.

As to those $500 dollar computers even corporations are learning their lessons there. Such hardware can't perform well with the overhead of virus checkers, network management tools and other software.

Yes that seems to be the mentality. But then because they are buying bottom end hardware it ends up having to be replaced more frequently. Plus once it get to the end users they generally have to upgrade the hardware to make it useful. I have first hand knowledge here with an IT department that would buy PC's with so little RAM that they could barely run the software installed from MS, much less real apps.

In many cases it is a question of making the IT budget look good and pushing the cost of viable hardware onto the using department. In other words it is corporate mentality that wouldn't be tolerated in a small company. Especially considering a small company would want to make sure that each employee wash adequately supplied with hardware to do an effective job.

However what is becoming obvious is that the poor management of these corporate IT departments has lead to some glaring problems with PC's in these environments. In the end I think you will be seeing more holistic approach to managing PC isn large corporations in the future. One thing that is likely to go is the idea that the IT departments can dump marginal PC's on to user departments to help their budgets. In the end it is more costly than buying the right hardware in the first place. This is something that small companies understand better.


Dave

I feel your on target with referencing the Idea the business cannot stop to wait for the appointment. But recently found that some business owners just might feel the ideal of having the apple support a benifit when it comes to apple support cost vs. IT tech/consultant cost to repair a given workstation. I have a client now running Mac's using boot camp and Parallels, with respect to this the MAC's are holding there own running the applications (the image resolution is much greater then any pc I have seen), but thru windows! So you are cost for the MAC is much higher as you must by parallels and windows software. IT must maintain now two operating systems, much more time consuming (updates do not dissapear on the MAC OS side) so in my ipinion the savings dissapear. Apple support will not touch the windows side! Further in case of a failure, you must unplugg the MAC carry it off to your apple store or get apple care for an onsite visit and that takes time with no guarenteed result of a repair (I have been in that position). So count on at lesat 3 days repair if your MAC goes down. Some business owners still think that might be fine as they do not see the price of the IT consultant, but that is not effiencient in my opinion. Slowly but surely I would imagine MAC's will make it in the buisness areana but it will be painfull, as they have been catering to more of the home consumer mentality.       

I probably don't know all of the details, but I've wondered for years if the $500 enterprise PCs will trend toward slim clients instead.