MP: Mac OS adoption rate in the enterprise increases and accelerates

THE GIST

Gist: The business market share of Mac systems is increasing and this trend is accelerating. The current marketshare is of 4.5% (see exhibit section below).

Origins: The popularity of the consumer devices (iPod and iPhone) lead to a halo effect benefiting Mac computers. Increasingly cheap, easy to use and polished virtualization technologies make the switch seamless by allowing to run a Windows VM on a Mac system.

At Stake: Organizations seeking to attract and retain top talent should recognize the fact that talent today, especially Gen Y talent, will flow to the organizations providing them the best working conditions to be highly productive. That in turn means running a Mac system, for an increasing share of this talent pool. Not providing this flexibility means you forgo one strong competitive advantage your competitors may offer.

Actionable ?: Capitalize on the consumerization of IT and the virtualization advances and offer employees a choice of hardware de-connected from your choices of business systems softwares.

MORE DETAILS

Origins

• Virtualization: the possibility to run seamlessly legacy windows applications on a Mac OS X means switching carries no risk for productive workers: at worst, they use all their legacy apps on the Windows virtual machine. At best, they use all the Mac OS stack, save the couple, mandated, applications that run only on Windows.
• Media capabilities of Mac OS X: as the need to use more and in a better way media components in presentations is increasingly recognized, so does the media capabilities of OS X.
• Halo effect from iPod and iPhone: classic halo effect, accelerates with the iPhone.
• Increased consumer marketshare: not to be confused by a halo effect. Business executives buying a mac for home use and then bringing it to work are more and more common (latest estimate is a yearly Mac growth of 25-29 %).

At Stake/Actionable ?

Strategy

Single most important impact of this trend will be to discriminates further in terms of talent attraction and retention. The main difference between Mac and Windows OS is their support to the creative knowledge workers. As these positions become more and more where competitive advantage is created or lost, and more and more difficult to fill (attract and retain), access to the best tools will discriminate. We can all view the OSs the way we want. An increasing share of this talent pool wants to be as productive as they can be, and they don’t see how to achieve this on a Win machine.

Corporate

Follows the strategy axis: IT needs to support HR for this. If IT is allowed to rule in this domain by saying “No, not possible”, then talent attraction will be sub-optimal.

Actions here ? IT needs to seek the best flexibility / standardization trade-off. But no, one OS isn’t acceptable.

Example(s)/Exhibit(s)

Use cases:

• IBM launches a pilot program to bring Macs inside: the highly positive results direct from IBM (86% of the pilot users preferred to keep their Mac at the end) and a more strategic view
• Anecdotal evidence of how Mac switching spreads in a SME (Roger Ehrenberg)
• Anecdotal evidence in the finance industry (Excel mammoth user, so interesting to see a trend there as well), direct from Equity Private

Exhibits:

• Corporate Desktop Operating System Trends, Q4 2007 Through Q2 2008, Forrester report, August 22th 2008

More MP ? Resources page. Suggestions, corrections ? Comment and I’ll update.

| PRINT