A sign of Macs to come
Nearly three years ago, my company had no Macs. When I joined, I insisted on getting a Mac, and for nearly a year I was the lone Mac user within our small company.
Two-and-a-half years later, we've grown nearly tenfold, and 70 percent of the company uses Macs. Nearly all new employees choose a Mac, and even those who stay with their comfortable Windows box (ThinkPads, mostly), within a year they are asking to swap out for a Mac, too.
Macs are contagious. But they are much more so now that Apple has given its advocates convenient ways to "sell" the Apple experience.
Businessweek wrote recently about the rise of the Mac within enterprises, quite possibly driven by the "iPod/iPhone halo effect" that pundits have long mused would drive Mac sales.
The iPhone and iPods are definitely helping to drive adoption of Macs, but I think the reason is actually more nuanced: These consumer-focused products give Mac advocates like me a convenient selling point when promoting the Mac.
Will it be hard to use?
No, it will be just as easy to use as your iPod.
Does it work well with Microsoft Office?
Yes, you can run Microsoft's Office for Mac natively on the Mac, and it actually looks better on the Mac than on Windows. It works as well on the Mac as iTunes works on Windows.
And so on.
Apple advocates have always promoted the Mac as a better computing platform. Now, however, we actually have "gateway drugs" to get people hooked on the beautiful aesthetics, ease of use, and coolness of Apple technology through the iPhone, iPod, etc. We take our friends and family to the Mac store. We immerse them in the Apple experience.
And they like it. To an ever increasing degree, they like it.
Also, check out how Apple compares to Google, Microsoft, and open source in terms of industry interest.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
In terms of cost, well, 3 of the above-mentioned apps (Spybot, Ad-aware and Windows Defender) cost exactly nothing, and my anti-viral, NOD 32, is around $25 a year. More per year than the Mac, yes, but far from prohibitively expensive. And as hopefully everyone knows by now, these days it's far more the case of unpatched OS holes and/or stupid user behavior that invites and propagates malware infections. To coin a phrase, safe computing is no accident!
With MacOSX, your only personal computer choices are Apple, Apple, and Apple. No thanks.
In addition, Windows has a bigger and better library of available applications.
It's ironic that the writer of Open Road is a fan of the most closed and proprietary computer on the market.
Apple/Mac: Uses much of the technology developed for the PC. Apples tight grip on vendors/manufactures creates a market with premium pricing, limited styling and expensive repair bills.
........ I'll stick with my PC.
PS can someone get cnet to fix the emoticon server - having a firefox thread waiting for 3 minutes for a response from a non-existent server means I have to wait to get to Dave R's blog!!
Even the Director General is getting a MacBook Air. I think the option of being able to booot into windows for those who aren't comfortable or don't want the learning curve is a major factor. And then as they get into the using the mac start to explore OS X.
Coming from the Amiga world, I wasn't looking to jump to yet another niche computer, no matter how much larger that niche was. Admittedly the Mac does get a lot more right "under the hood" than Windows, but these days I spent far more time using my 'puter than tweaking it. So long as the S.O.B. works, doesn't matter what directory everything is in or how easy it is to uninstall a program, and I dare say I'm by no means alone in that attitude.
But hey, enjoy your computer of choice...and/or cult. Just remember: when The Jobs tells you to drink the iKool-Aid--dont! ;)
Additionally, with Windows computers it is frequently the case that business deals and not hardware performance or customer software needs are what determine the configuration of a machine, in large degree regardless of Windows ability to deal with the hardware requirements of the software/spyware that comes preinstalled. Which is probably why that most PC's come preloaded with crapware up the cache.
The truth that Microsoft apologists will have you believe is that Microsoft is a monopoly that purposely sought out to limit choice in the market, not increase it. Intentions and lawsuits, both criminal and civil, aside it has been consistently the case that empirical evaluations of productivity on computers favor the Mac platform over Windows. Microsoft has been in business for largely one purpose, to make the best business deals possible. Whether this means making a good product has been largely irrelevant and occassionatly coincidental if it can muscle manufacturers to include its OS. It's technical bar has long been set far lower than Apple's and other competitors who were less business saavy than MS has been. Mediocrity with Microsoft products is acceptable so long as it can keep OEM's from releasing competitors products at any cost and by any means possible, an activity that is documented in Microsofts legal history. At the end of the day it isn't about the product at Microsoft, it's about cutting a deal to make sure that consumers don't have other choices to realize how deficient the Microsoft products truly are. With Steve Balmer at the reins expect more of the same.
Worst must be PowerPoint... terrible to the point where it's almost unusable.
Apple needs it's own versionof Office badly if it wants to enter corporate market. MS will nevel have an Mac Office that runs as good as it does on a Windows PC.
However, if productivity is not a concern, by all means, Mac is so much more fun!
On the other side I can relate to those who buy Macs. It's a comp for those who are computer navs and want to stay that way. The design professional want's to create not worry about how a drive works or what goes where. Mac's are for those who don't care about buzz words, getting there hands dirty and that's fine unless you see one infront of you and scream that they can't get there computer to work only to find out they accidently pulled out the power cord, I've had that happen, or when they have ram installed and can't figure out why there mac isn't working all because it was installed incorrectly, again I had this happen. Mac's are in some case over designed and it's operating system is fun to use. on the final front, The Mac Mini is a comp I may soon buy because I like it's size and the experience it gives bye being the only affordable Mac out there. Oh and I can buy a better mouse thank god
There is so much water under this bridge. In the late 80s, all the affluent e30 class BMW 3 series had a little Apple sticker in the window, and Mac was going to upset the status quo and make inroads into areas that were not its niche.
Clever marketing and susceptible consumers are Apples strongest cards. Granted, tighter control over manufacturing and gee-whiz bleeding edge adoption of new technologies, coupled with a certain philosophy of ease-of-use (in NORMAL operations) have always made Mac a decent alternative in certain niches. And Mac has achieved more for *nix in half a decade than Linux was able to do in the preceding 15 years - but this "massive wave of Macintosh adoption" based on iPhone and iPod sales isn't going to ever materialize.
I just saw the latest Mac commercial where they're talking about how Mac is the most popular computer on college campuses. I mean, College kids are notorious for choosing the practical solution over the impractical, right?
Yes, niave, uneducated, idealistic young adults who are still primarily preoccupied with establishing their personal identity are drawn to this product like bees to honey.
The same group who is easily influenced to vote for a Presidential candidate because he did drugs and didn't inhale and played a sax on late night TV.
I'm thinking that this isn't your best example of the rational and logical thought process of your fastest growing user base.
'nuff said.
My personality is established, I'm not naive, and I'm not uneducated. I'm in college and I run a Mac because it just works. (Unlike a Dell 600m that ate its hard drive every other month.)
How on Earth do you manage to draw a link between Mac computers and Bill Clinton?? For your information, he only got 43% of the youth vote in '92. If you're don't know what you're talking about, don't talk.
I look for simplicity, ease of use, something my 64 year old mom that has never in touch with technology can use to listen to her brand new pink iPod, something I enjoy looking at, something doesn't bother me with rebooting my system when I'm enjoying my music or my pics because it downloaded an update "solving" a security issue, I want my computer to be fast. For all of this and much more I'm one of those who is turning their heads to Apple
- by htoole318 May 16, 2008 8:28 AM PDT
- Mac's are nice computers, but they are not designed for the work place in a large business environment. The company I work for has offices all over the world and thousands of clients, and lets be real, we cant deal with an os, that only 8% of the world is using. Thats right, apple has only 8% of the market......same as vista...lol. This article is a joke, is the office a mom and pop landscaping company, heck the iphone needs updates just to be secure in an office environment, and how many business have banned mp3 players due to virus and productivity problems.....
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
-
- by jolysmoke May 23, 2008 3:11 AM PDT
- You sure put your finger on the problem, chum, when you said that Mac OS has the same share of the market as Vista. So they are now running neck and neck! And when business managers, like home users, ask which is the better system, faster, safer and more reliable, then the race is over for MS. At least as an OS, for they will still be able to sell Office 2008 for Mac for a while so they can read their old correspondence on Word etc.
- Like this
-
Showing 1 of 3 pages (98 Comments)