Apple in the Enterprise

It's always been fairly easy to find a Mac or two in any given business. The machines would be in the graphic department or would be running Dreamweaver for the Web Person. You could pretty much count on two things:

• The IT Department wouldn't touch the Macs, hell or high water
• Whoever had one also had a Windows box at least 50% of the time

That's changing. Business Week reports a new survey that says more than two thirds of respondents - 68% - said they will allow their employees to use Macs as their corporate enterprise desktops in the next 12 months.

Note that "allow". This isn't the graphic geek who NEEDS the Mac, this is just people wanting them. As those people are likely to include managers, CEO's and other people that IT can't ignore, that steadfast refusal to support anything but Windows will have to change.. rapidly.

Though there's less support needed.. well, maybe more when it comes to melding into structures designed for homogenized PC's running a specific version of some specific software, but who's fault is that really? If some app requires IE 6 and nothing else because of lazy (or incompetent) programmers, is that Apple's problem?

PC's came into the workplace because people brought them in. A lot of that was driven by Visicalc, the first spreadsheet (if we'd had software patents ten, the world would be a very different place today!). The business computing environment then was mainframes and minicomputers, attended to by Very Important People who had disdain for "lusers" and didn't want those machines brought in. Unfortunately for them, the people bringing them in weren't unimportant little worker bees: no, they were accountants, managers, CEO's.. so IT had to adapt.

Just as they'll have to adapt to Mac's now.