Is it Mac, is it PC... what's your favorite? As a home user, it's more "what I like" than "what I need," but when we talk about a business environment, things are radically different. In a recent study, the results turned out to show a domination of the Macs nobody could have imagined, or at least "I would have never imagined." The most interesting part is that, if this continues to happen, more and more home users will start buying a Mac for home, and the reason should be obvious - it's not too pleasant to work on different platforms when you're not a "hardcore" IT guy. Now, let's see that study's results, shall we?
The story goes like this - Yankee Group conducted a survey involving no less than 750 IT administrators and C-level executives to find that almost 4 out of 5 businesses have at least a few Macs and the Mac OS X operating system present in their networks. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to answer the questions of those wondering about Mac or PC from a business perspective. There are a lot of factors involved, and knowing that almost 80% of the businesses in a survey like this one have "at least" a few Macs could mean that a certain company has 2500 Windows PCs, and 5 Macs...
"Although the Apple Mac hardware and OS X operating systems still represent a small niche, adoption and acceptance of Mac hardware and operating system software are growing at a steady and sustained pace not seen since the late 1980s," said Yankee Group, and if we look at the problem I mentioned above, there's some kind of answer to that one, too, because of those who answered the questions in the survey, less than 25% said their companies had a "significant" number of Macs. What does "significant" mean? It seems the study is considering 30-50 units to qualify as "significant," but I must repeat this - it depends a lot on the size of the network.
At last, those interested to know more about Mac or PC from a business perspective, they should keep in mind the Time Machine embedded backup solution available with the Macs, as well as the Anywhere Applications features. Even more, according to a report presented earlier this year by Piper Jaffray, Apple's growing market share in the enterprise sector has been seriously influenced by the successful entry into the smartphone business, as they recently announced that over 30% of the Fortune 500 companies already sought access to the ongoing iPhone Enterprise Beta program.
