8 of 10 businesses use Macs
June 26th 2008
In recent months, there has been a lot of talk about Macs in the enterprise. There have been studies saying that Macs are cheaper to support and that corporate users are more satisfied with the fairer platform. Still, anecdotes aside there haven't been any studies, any hard numbers that show the Mac's prevalence in the enterprise.
Today, Infoworld brings us the news that 80 percent of businesses have Macs, nearly double the number that said they had users running Mac OS X two years ago--all of this an more from Yankee Group, which surveyed over 700 senior IT admins and C-level (wash your hands) executives.
"Then we were talking about onesies and twosies," said Laura DiDio, a Yankee Group research fellow. "Now, the number of actual users is very significant. A number of the businesses said that they had 50 or 100 or even several thousand Macs deployed."
The last time DiDio surveyed corporate types, 47 said that they supported Macs in their enterprises. That the Mac's presence nearly doubled without any effort on Apple's part.
"This isn't a tidal wave, but it's certainly a sustained trend," she said. "Apple has a beachhead in business. Where it once had just 1-2 percent market share in corporate, now they're up to 8-10 percent."
Of the Macs in use in corporations, 28 percent are running Windows either in a virtual machine, a la Parallels, or using Apple's Boot Camp.
Further, eight out of 10 of the people surveyed rated Mac hardware reliability as either "excellent" or "very good."
Editor's note: So, if Yankee Group's data is to be believed, then Apple's market share in the enterprise is roughly on par with what it is in the general population? I don't think so. Yes, there are Mac-loving corporations out there, but there a lot more Mac-hating admins quashing every attempt to use the fairer platform.
It's great that there are more of us out there working in the enterprise, but it doesn't seem likely that we yet number one-in-10...
What's your take?
