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No, Salesforce is Not Switching to Mac. But is Your Company?

Posted by: Peter Burrows on April 28

Word that Salesforce.com is giving Macs to all of its 4000 employees, from iPhone programmer Alex Curlyo at Under the Bridge, has made it to Valleywag and beyond. That’s led to interesting posts on the implications, such as this and this.

But while Salesforce does let its employees use either a PC or a Mac, vice president of corporate strategy Bruce Francis says it is not true that the company is buying a Mac for each of its employees. “We have a policy of employee choice,” says Francis.

So here’s what I want to know: Do you work at, or do you know of, any big companies that have embraced the Mac of late? Have they dumped Microsoft, with its hazardous, uncertain upgrade path? Or are they just allowing the Mac in as an equal partner?

And Mac lovers out there: are you finding it easier to convince your company’s IT shop to let you use your Mac as your work client?

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Reader Comments

seth

April 28, 2008 10:55 AM

If given a choice, 99% of employees will probably choose a mac...so effectively they are switching to Mac

Crawford

April 28, 2008 04:33 PM

"Have they dumped Microsoft, with its hazardous, uncertain upgrade path."

Ooooh, somebody get Lee Clow at Chiat on the phone, I see a new HazMat suit-clad John Hodgman spot in the offing. Great visual cue, Bruce.

Constable Odo

April 30, 2008 07:39 PM

They should force all their employees to get Macs then give them a choice to install Leopard or Windows XP or Vista. The Mac runs them all so what's the big deal. Turn them all into dual boot machines. Just so long as Apple sells more Macs.

Jaded Consumer

June 25, 2008 07:17 PM

Switching to the Mac may be a curiosity now, and for some folks may or may not look like it promises near-term savings.

What interests me as a trend is the confluence of two trends: expansion of Apple platform adoption outside the US, and increase in the value of the platform created by the localization support in Cocoa.

I argue here ...
http://jadedconsumer.blogspot.com/2008/06/selling-apples-all-over-world.html

... that the iPhone will lead to improvement in platform value, and that the localization support of the platform will combine with developer familiarity via the iPhone to lead to increased desktop adoption down the road. The basic idea is that without a standard in smartphones, Apple stands to gain the position Microsoft has in desktops, to wit, ownership of the platform with the best application offerings. The difference is that Apple's localization support in Cocoa and its decision to ship XCode for free mean Apple could achieve this a bit faster than Microsoft might have been able to do it had its WinCE been a success.

Ex MS Man

June 9, 2009 10:35 PM

Are you really serious? Anyone given the choice and with the persistence of a proper eval says goodbye to windows forever. I've converted 200+ Windows users to Mac and only 1 has ever returned (no his surname was not Gates)

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A blog on the daily doings of Apple and the many companies in its orbit, with insight and analysis by two longtime Apple-watchers BusinessWeek Senior Writer Peter Burrows and BusinessWeek.com Senior Technology Writer Arik Hesseldahl.

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