chonghy

jmgregory1 said:

eightzero said:

jorgie said:

I work for a fairly large university (5K staff, 30K students) and the Surface Pro 3/4 has been our default choice for mobile users for 3 years now. We have tried everything from Dell multiple other vendors, and nothing really competes yet.

Just to clarify: you say this is your employer's default choice, and nothing really competes. I would read that as the supplier (employer) making the choice for the user, not that the user finds it meets their needs or desires. Perhaps it is the default choice based solely on price? Or some other criteria that is important to the purchaser, and not the user?

I would go a step further and suggest that in the case of many, if not most, universities and large businesses, the reason why there is a continuation of the MS based PC hardware and software is the fact that the very people who direct and work in the IT departments:
1. are MS die-hard fans / users
2. need to justify their existence
3. buy into the "low" cost hardware available

Sure, there can be issues with software that doesn't have a Mac alternative, but given the fact that Apple addressed that years ago with Bootcamp making the MacBook Pro what used to be considered the best PC you could buy, suggests that's not a good excuse.  

So I go back to my three points above as reasons why the PC hangs on.  The problem for Microsoft, is that consumers who tried an iPhone, or iPad, when they were really the only game worth considering for a good smartphone or tablet (for the price), unsurprisingly liked what Apple had, got hooked into the ecosystem and started to buy Apple MacBooks, MacBook Pro's and iMacs. 

And once they've got Apple at home, many then pushed to use the same thing at work, resulting in many companies, including IBM, to realize that it's better to use an Apple product - even when you factor in the higher initial cost,  as they cost less to use over time.

Every company I have worked for, going back to the days when there wasn't such a thing as a PC, now operate using a combination of PC's and Macs, where the PC users are now the exceptions, not the majority they once were.  I remember back in 2007, when the first iPhone came out, every business colleague I knew was using a Blackberry.  They all laughed at me (I'm a tech early adapter) when I would pull out my iPhone, saying how they could never switch, would never switch, from a physical keyboard to an on-screen keyboard.  I would ask them to pull up a website to look at something business related and they'd get this horrid rendering of a site, with almost nothing laid out correctly.  I'd pull out my iPhone to show them what it should look like, and this is when the Blackberry shell started to crack.  They'd see a website rendered just like what they'd see on their laptop and then they'd start asking what else the iPhone could do.

At one company, a small retail chain run by a very creative owner, there was a mix of Macs and PC's, more Macs than PC's.  But when the owners sold to a private equity firm, and new upper management was hired, they came in and pushed to get everyone (outside of the graphic design team) on the same laptop, buying a ton of knockoff Thinkpad's (mostly Compaq / HP versions).  I went through 2 laptops in 4 months, both suffering from BSOD syndrome and if I remember correctly, the same issue effected 15 other people as well.  I told them I'd use my personal MacBook Pro instead of trying to get another replacement.

I ended up leaving the company shortly after, but my wife still worked there so I would go back and visit occasionally and had to laugh seeing the CEO not only working on a MacBook Pro, but having ditched her Blackberry for an iPhone not even 18 months since coming on board.  In fact the CEO was proud to show me she was all "Mac" now.  They also went from having three IT people to just one, in part because some many people moved from PC to Mac.