A new survey conducted by Yankee Group Research Inc. of more than 700 senior IT administrators and C-level executives revealed that nearly 80% of businesses have Macs in-house. This number is up from the last survey in 2006 which indicated that 47% of businesses had in-house Macs.
Two interesting details of this survey are:
- 21% of the firms surveyed reported having delpoyed more than 50 Macs (some ranged into the thousands)
- 28% of the firms reported running Windows in a virtual machine on the Macs
Clearly, virtualization software has helped catalyze this trend towards Mac delpoyment. The two leaders in virtualization software are VMware Inc. (their product is Fusion) and Parallels.
In business and in education, there is an increasing trend towards making the Mac the platform of choice. The one unfortunate side-effect from this trend may be the increased (although minimal) exposure of the Mac OS to hackers’ efforts.
The cover story on last week’s Business Week was about the Mac’s growing presence in the corporate world.
While this trend is not particularly surprising to most seasoned Mac users, it’s notable for the fact that Apple has spent very little resources directly targeting this market. And yet, March, 2008 sales for Macs exceeded all forecasts, climbing 51% over the previous year. The article points out that combined Mac, iPhone and iPod sales grew from $5.2 billion in fiscal 2002 to $24 billion in 2007. Apple’s share price has risen 2,300% over the past 5 years.
It appears that a number of factors are at work here, including cross over from iPod and iPhone sales. However, one major factor may be the troubled Vista operating system, which seems to have been a dog from the start. Microsoft’s own Steve Ballmer calls Vista a “work in progress.”
