Cover Story: The Mac In The Gray Flannel Suit

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on May 01, 2008

BusinessWeek’s cover story this week, deftly written by Peter and with an assist from myself, Steve Wildstrom and Jay Greene, is about something that should warm the heart of many a Mac fan: The Mac is winning more converts in corporations than ever before.

Yes we’ve heard it all before, and yes we’re talking a relatively small movements in relation to Windows, which still largely controls the world of corporate desktops. But we have a lot of evidence to make the point. A Yankee Group survey that is soon to be published, found that of some 250 companies surveyed, 87% of them have some Macs in their organizations, whereas this number was only 48% two years ago.

We looked high and low for examples where the Mac is making inroads in corporations, and found plenty. I found Werner Enterprises, a $2 billion, publicly held trucking and transport company whose 150 Macs make up more than 7% of its 2,000 desktops. And they don’t just belong to the marketing department or to the graphics department: They’re directly tied in to a core business function. Werner calls it “optimization” and it involves planning which truck is going to take what load, and the route it will take and so on. One detail that didn’t make it into the story: The heart of the optimization engine at Werner is a grid of 12 Apple-made X-Serves, which are responsible for the heavy number-crunching associated with the planning. Peter and I talk about some Werner and some of the other examples we found with Executive Editor John Byrne here in the Behind the Cover podcast.

Werner also does something we heard over and over among the companies we talked to: Employees are more often than not being allowed to choose a Mac or a PC as their office computer. The story is almost always the same. Someone has a Mac at home and they ask the boss if they can have a Mac at the office to in order to have a more consistent environment. The Mac’s ability to boot to Windows in Boot Camp, or run Windows at the same time via Parallels or Fusion has certainly helped these folks make their case to the boss, and frankly many bosses are switching too.

You’d think that Apple would be all to keen to ride this wave and go after corporate accounts in a big way. The fact is corporate sales just aren’t Apple’s thing. While here are account reps who work with big companies like Werner, Apple tends not work with the big systems integrator companies like EDS and others. It’s growth has certainly been phenomenal as it has focused almost entirely on the consumer and education markets, but I personally think this trend of increased demand among corporate buyers is going to force Apple to act.

And the rumor is they may be. Peter Kafka over at Silicon Alley Insider (who as luck would have it will be our guest on The Digital Dish tomorrow) reported yesterday that Apple is said to be looking for new office space in Manhattan, and not just a little, but 15,000 square feet near the flagship Apple store on Fifth Avenue. I was surprised to learn recently that Apple currently has office space in the Citicorp Center, and did my Leopard briefings with Apple PR there. One might guess that Apple might be willing to go after more corporate sales in Gotham. There’s also about to be a big corporate push to get the iPhone into corporate hands, and a lot of Mac sales will probably follow along with that effort. My feeling is that Apple will find more business among corporate customers than it ever expected.

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