More On Macs In The Workplace

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on August 07, 2008

If you needed any further proof that the Mac is quickly growing in a force in the workplace, a subject which Peter and I have spent a lot of time thinking about in recent months, look no further than the latest study on the subject from The Yankee Group.

We referred to early results from this Yankee survey in the cover story “The Mac In The Gray Flannel Suit” in May. At that time the survey set included only 250 companies. Now it includes 750, and even with the larger survey set, the results are impressive. Some 80% have Macs running OS X on their enterprise networks, and Mac installations in the enterprise are growing at what analyst Laura Didio calls “a sustained rate not seen since the 1980s.”

She says she did the same survey two-and-a-half years ago, and maybe two companies in five responded that they had Macs in their enterprise. Now that number is four companies in five.

And this isn’t limited to just a few machines in the marketing and the art departments. These are often – in at least 25% of the time — sizable deployments of 30 to 50 machines. “And there were several dozen respondents who indicated their businesses ran primarily on Macs. In these sites, the number of Macs ranged from several hundred to as many as 5,000 Macs,” the report says. A third of companies in the survey said they were likely to add more Macs within the coming 6 to 12 months.

There are a few challenges she says. First Apple is still battling a lingering perception that its products command a “significant price premium.” That’s true as I hear people saying that to me all the time, when they say they’re considering making the big switch over to the Mac. Another thing is that corporate customers say they want more powerful management tools geared specifically to their needs. “Our user base really wants the Mac, but their management tools are lacking and there isn’t any enterprise-level software or hardware support. We can’t have people running to the mall when they have computing problems,” said one manager at a large corporation quoted in the report. Apple, are you listening?

Meanwhile, I was on vacation when the news came on July 4 that German publisher Axel Springer, the huge German publishing concern, said it will move its entire corporation – some 12,000 desktops – to the Mac. That will make it Apple’s largest enterprise customer in Europe, and second only overall to Google. (Those of you who speak German can see the video announcement here. If you’ve been trying to find some fuel to convince the boss to make your next machine a Mac, there’s now plenty to be found.

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