Macs Are a Major Business Platform

[Toe]

I am absolutely floored by this report.
http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/07/21/osx/

The report found that in businesses with 250 employees or more, 17 percent of the employees were running Mac OS X on their desktop computer at work. In Businesses that had 10,000 or more employees, 21 percent of employees used Mac OS X on their desktop work computer.

So in major enterprises, more than one in five of the people there use Macs.

Why aren't Mac users shouting this from the rooftops?

I had always been under the impression that at best, Macs in business mirrored their overall market share... ranging from 2 all the way up to near 5 percent. I never would have guessed this.

Isn't this major, major news for the Mac community?

 

[yellow]

If true (even partially true), this is so very, very, very, very, very, very good for me. Oh, so good..

 

[BGil]

The numbers are obviously BS.

A while back, Microsoft announced that they had over 200 million business installs of XP SP2 (not including 2000, 98, ME etc.). 17 percent of that is 34 million. Has Apple even sold 34 million machines in the last decade?

 

[Sun Baked]

The numbers are obviously BS.

A while back, Microsoft announced that they had over 200 million business installs of XP SP2 (not including 2000, 98, ME etc.). 17 percent of that is 34 million. Has Apple even sold 34 million machines in the last decade?

Most of these studies are US corporations.

And based on the...

http://www.census.gov/population/www/popclockus.html

So are yours.

 

[Toe]

The numbers are obviously BS.

A while back, Microsoft announced that they had over 200 million business installs of XP SP2 (not including 2000, 98, ME etc.). 17 percent of that is 34 million. Has Apple even sold 34 million machines in the last decade?

Apple ships over a million Macs a quarter. Also, Macs retain their value/usefulness much longer. A lot of those Windows machines that got deployed last year got scuttled this year. A lot of Macs that got deployed in 2000 keep chugging along...

I just went to a tradeshow where a drug company was showing a cool simulation environment. In a cage under the demo area was a collection of Blue and White G3 PowerMacs....

 

[yellow]

A while back, Microsoft announced that they had over 200 million business installs of XP SP2 (not including 2000, 98, ME etc.).

To me, those numbers are obvious BS too. Were they accounting for the boxes that have to be rebuilt repeatedly as people got used to what worked (and what didn't) with XPsp2? Statistics can be made to make anything look realistic. 78% of people know that.

 

[pubwvj]

One of the big things to keep in mind when ever you read those market share numbers for Windows vs Macintosh (3% or 5%) is that the vast majority of Windows machines are doing really dull work. They are used for cash registers, systems controls machines, accounting, single program tasks like kiosks, controlling nuclear power plants (eek!!!) and other non-creative and often non-human interface tasks.

Among people I know about 40% of them are using Macintoshes. That is much higher than the quoted 5% market share. That is a much more realistic number for actual users.

The other thing is that those percentages are current sales. Macintoshes last an average of about three times as long as Windows PCs so this actually triples the real user base numbers at least.

Windows does not have as high a margin as they would like to claim. And they are slipping, fast.

 

[BGil]

Apple ships over a million Macs a quarter. Also, Macs retain their value/usefulness much longer. A lot of those Windows machines that got deployed last year got scuttled this year. A lot of Macs that got deployed in 2000 keep chugging along...

I just went to a tradeshow where a drug company was showing a cool simulation environment. In a cage under the demo area was a collection of Blue and White G3 PowerMacs....

They ship a million Macs a quarter now, it wasn't always that way. Even if they shipped 40 million Macs in the last decade (1 million per quarter for 10 years) that would mean virtually all of those Macs would have to still be in use. And it would mean that most of those Macs would have to be in the business sector (250 employees or more) and not the consumer sector. No effing way.

Macs retain their resell value longer than PC's but not their usefulness. Mac users just have longer upgrade cycles because Macs are more expensive and Apple has an anemic product refresh schedule.

Lot's of PC's sold in 98, 99, and 2000 are still in use as are Windows 98, ME and 2000. Virtually anyone in IT can tell you that.

To me, those numbers are obvious BS too. Were they accounting for the boxes that have to be rebuilt repeatedly as people got used to what worked (and what didn't) with XPsp2?

Do you work in IT? If you did you'd know that it's standard practice in IT departments to start testing new software on a limited number of machines long before the product actually is rolled out. That's why Microsoft gave public previews of SP2 and why they still give 6-month to 1-year trials of Windows Server 2003 and their 64-bit OSes. Likewise, it's why Longhorn Server Beta 1 (due in the next few weeks) is a public preview and why the client release is not.

Anyway, the enterprise edition of XP SP2 broke hardly anything. 95% of the broken apps can from the firewall being on by default, the hardware virus protection, and the new admin security policies. None of those things are on by default in the enterprise edition of SP2.

But either way, 200 million is just the number of SP2 installs, it says nothing of the rest of the XP installs, Windows 2000 installs, Windows NT 4 installs, Windows Server 2003 installs, Windows ME and 98 installs etc.
200 million is a very very low number considering something like 40% of businesses are still running Windows 2000 instead of 2003 and XP.

There are over 400 million users of Office 2000, XP, and 2003 for comparison.

 

[BGil]

One of the big things to keep in mind when ever you read those market share numbers for Windows vs Macintosh (3% or 5%) is that the vast majority of Windows machines are doing really dull work. They are used for cash registers, systems controls machines, accounting, single program tasks like kiosks, controlling nuclear power plants (eek!!!) and other non-creative and often non-human interface tasks.

Among people I know about 40% of them are using Macintoshes. That is much higher than the quoted 5% market share. That is a much more realistic number for actual users.

The other thing is that those percentages are current sales. Macintoshes last an average of about three times as long as Windows PCs so this actually triples the real user base numbers at least.

Windows does not have as high a margin as they would like to claim. And they are slipping, fast.

Bull. The average Windows user (including business users) upgrades hardware about every 3-4 years. That would mean people are waiting 9-12 years to upgrade their Mac.

Go to Apple-history.com and look at 1996. Those would be the computers that are just beginning to get phased out this year (assuming what you say is true). The original iMac (233 mhz no CDRW, no DVD, 4GB hard drive) would still be 2 years from being phased out. Obviously that's not true.

At best, Macs have a 4-5 year life cycle. At 4-5 years, the models being phased out this year would be between the 500 mhz iMac/PowerMac range and the original TiBook/G4 iBook (400-500mhz).
Keep in mind we haven't even gotten to the introduction of the iLamp iMacs yet.

At 4-5 years that would put Macs at about 1.5 times the PC lifecycle. Their install base would be about 1.5 times their marketshare for the last 4-5 years or about 3.5-4.5%. 5% of 200 million is 10 million, which is about the number of OS X users, right?

Of the 2 million users of Tiger already represent 16 percent of Apple’s entire Mac OS X user base. Forty-nine percent of Mac OS X users are running Panther, and 25 percent of Mac OS X users are still running Jaguar. The remainder are “laggards on early versions of Mac OS X,” according to Jobs.

If 2 million is 16% then that means there are 12.5 million Mac OS X users total.

17% of 200 million ( which is a very conservative estimate of the number of Windows business computers) is 34 million. Even if all of Apple's OS X user base are business users then where are they getting the other 22 million from?

That's 10 years of Mac sales, with every single one still in use and not replaced, and all in the business sector. The numbers don't add up, period.

 

[pubwvj]

Bull.

How about sheep instead? Really though, you don't have to start swearing.

The average Windows user (including business users) upgrades hardware about every 3-4 years. That would mean people are waiting 9-12 years to upgrade their Mac.

Two things:

1) PC's are being replaced much faster than that and when they are replaced the old ones are usually 'retired' (e.g., discarded, landfilled, junked, trashed...) There was an article about this a while back in an IT magazine. The articles also talked about the lifetime cost of ownership for PCs being higher than Macs. Interesting reading especially given it was in a PC dominated magazine.

2) When Macs are replaced by their first owner they usually move to a new owner rather than being junked as is the case with PCs. This happens repeatedly. This means they have a much longer lifespan. A 10 year lifespan is not at all unusual for Macs.

No bull.[/QUOTE]

 

[Sun Baked]

Lot's of PC's sold in 98, 99, and 2000 are still in use as are Windows 98, ME and 2000. Virtually anyone in IT can tell you that.

Cool any IT professional can tell me there are a lot of Pentium 2&3s running at 350-500 MHz still in wide use in corporations.

 

[BGil]

Two things:

1) PC's are being replaced much faster than that and when they are replaced the old ones are usually 'retired' (e.g., discarded, landfilled, junked, trashed...) There was an article about this a while back in an IT magazine. The articles also talked about the lifetime cost of ownership for PCs being higher than Macs. Interesting reading especially given it was in a PC dominated magazine.

2) When Macs are replaced by their first owner they usually move to a new owner rather than being junked as is the case with PCs. This happens repeatedly. This means they have a much longer lifespan. A 10 year lifespan is not at all unusual for Macs.
[/QUOTE]

1. Macs in the business sector are junked out just as much as PC's are. No company is going to throw out their old PC's but migrate their old Macs to other users. Any company with both Macs and PCs are likely to treat them the same way partially due to budget issues.

2. Go look at what models Apple was selling 10 years ago then tell me about how many of those are still in use. Even look at the ones sold 6 years ago and you'll see not many are in use.

3. The minimum upgrade cycle for PC's has always been 3 years. Since the economic downturn the cycle has slowed to around 4-5 years. Even if the usual life cycle for a Mac is 10 years (it isn't but for arguement sake) it would mean that every single Mac Apple has sold in the last decade would be to a business and still in use (given that there are well over 200 million business windows users). Obviously that is not the case.

4. The numbers I have provided match up with Apple's own numbers (12.5 million OS X users), Microsoft's numbers (200 million just on SP2 alone), and the average buyinh cycle for businesses and corporations whether they be MAc-based or PC-based (about 3-5 years). If anything those numbers are conservative. 5% business install base seems about the max that Apple could logically have.

5. Slightly OT: The 15% install base number that Appple fans are always quoting is flase also. There are well over 600 million Windows users. Some reports put that number at 720 million-850 million. In the last 3 years there have been about 550 million sales of Windows-based machines. 15% of 600 million is 90 million Macs installed and currently in use. I don't even think Apple has sold that many computers in it's entire history much less in a time period that would allow all of those machines to still be in use. 5% of 600 million is 30 million. Apple claims there are 12.5 million people on OS X.

 

[yellow]

I do work in IT, and I'm well aware of how our corporate testing cycles work. You completly missed the point that numbers can be skewed any way one likes to prove a point. There's no telling what variables were taken into account to make the numbers appear favorable. I don't believe the numbers in that (poorly written) article, and I don't believe the numbers from Microsoft. I look at the hard facts that directly impact me.

 

[XNine]

Oh please, everyone knows that Linux is the biggest corporate based platform.

 

[colocolo]

OT, but may i ask you BGil what motivates you to post in these boards? I've read most of your posts and all you do is praise Microsoft and their Vaporware (only name fit to describe what hasn't been released yet, sorry no offense intended), and imply there is no real reason of having a Mac over a Windows PC.

I am truly baffled by your presence here.

Why would you want to hang with us? Not that it bothers me, but I can't see myself getting into a site about Microsoft rumors ever!

 

[BGil]

and imply there is no real reason of having a Mac over a Windows PC.

That's not what I did. Someone asked me why I, personally, perfer PC's and I told them. For most other people I often recommend Macs over PC's because most people aren't into building their own machines and things like that.

colocolo OT, but may i ask you BGil what motivates you to post in these boards? I've read most of your posts and all you do is praise Microsoft and their Vaporware (only name fit to describe what hasn't been released yet, sorry no offense intended),

I use a Mac a lot and Mac forums are the best way to learn more about them IMO. I've been reading this forum and many others for a longtime and suddenly I got kinda sick of all the misinformation aboiut Longhorn/Vista. I've actually been looking for an intelligent and well structured debate or conversation about new Longhorn or Tiger technologies but it seems no one here wants to have one.

I'm quickly learning that this forum isn't one filled with people who care to know about technology (ya know, geeks) but people who care to know about Macs and very little else. They openly bash products from others even without knowing the slightest thing about them. To me, that kind of behavior is one of the things that Mac users always pointed to when describing PC users who perfer PC's or Windows. What I'm actually finding, is this forum is filled with more blindly lead zealots than any of the PC forums I frequent. I mean, you can go to notebookforums.com, anandtech, avsforums, iexbeta, winbeta, neowin, activewin, arstechnica, or dozens of other PC sites and not see a tenth of the zealotry you find here. Go to anandtech or notebookforums and ask "what kind of laptop should I get for school?". Numerous people will reply with "Powerbook" or "iBook" and there is nary a person there who would bash them for that answer. Try replying to that question here with "IBM Thinkpad" or "Acer" and watch the zealots come out in droves.

I'm starting to think that many people on the PC based forums (anandtech, arstechnica, notebookforums) know more about Macs (and PC's) thna the average poster here knows about Macs. It's amazing to come here and see people who believe that every little upturn in Apple's marketshare is due to the mythical Halo effect and is a sign that Apple is going to "gain major marketshare". Or people who take the word of Steve Jobs (like the Tiger = Longhorn or Longhorn is due late 2006/early2007 nonsense) as if it was written in the bible or koran.

Essientailly, I started posting here because I figured the people here where like me but slightly different. In other words, people who love computers but prefer Macs while I love computers but prefer PC's. Sorely, all I'm finding is a bunch of uninformed zealots here.

 

[DeSnousa]

I wonder how much Office for Mac contributed to this?

 

[Toe]

*SIGH*

It was fun while it lasted... but the phrasing of the report has been corrected. It now says:

The report found that 17 percent of businesses with 250 employees or more were running Mac OS X on their desktop computers. Twenty-one percent of businesses that had 10,000 or more employees used Mac OS X on their desktop.

It's still poorly worded, but I suppose it now says what most of expected was really meant... that 21% of big enterprises have some Macs in active use. But it sure was fun imagining Macs having that much penetration. As it is, that number is pretty disappointing... nearly eighty percent of big enterprise don't have ANY Macs in their environment.

 

[Lacero]

There was a report that said 2/3 of all survey data is either incomplete or completely wrong. Most surveys like these are pretty unreliable.

 

[altair]

They ship a million Macs a quarter now, it wasn't always that way. Even if they shipped 40 million Macs in the last decade (1 million per quarter for 10 years) that would mean virtually all of those Macs would have to still be in use. And it would mean that most of those Macs would have to be in the business sector (250 employees or more) and not the consumer sector. No effing way.

Macs retain their resell value longer than PC's but not their usefulness. Mac users just have longer upgrade cycles because Macs are more expensive and Apple has an anemic product refresh schedule.

Lot's of PC's sold in 98, 99, and 2000 are still in use as are Windows 98, ME and 2000. Virtually anyone in IT can tell you that.



Do you work in IT? If you did you'd know that it's standard practice in IT departments to start testing new software on a limited number of machines long before the product actually is rolled out. That's why Microsoft gave public previews of SP2 and why they still give 6-month to 1-year trials of Windows Server 2003 and their 64-bit OSes. Likewise, it's why Longhorn Server Beta 1 (due in the next few weeks) is a public preview and why the client release is not.

Anyway, the enterprise edition of XP SP2 broke hardly anything. 95% of the broken apps can from the firewall being on by default, the hardware virus protection, and the new admin security policies. None of those things are on by default in the enterprise edition of SP2.

But either way, 200 million is just the number of SP2 installs, it says nothing of the rest of the XP installs, Windows 2000 installs, Windows NT 4 installs, Windows Server 2003 installs, Windows ME and 98 installs etc.
200 million is a very very low number considering something like 40% of businesses are still running Windows 2000 instead of 2003 and XP.

There are over 400 million users of Office 2000, XP, and 2003 for comparison.

BGil is just defensive because he doesn't want to loose his IT job fixing windows boxes

 

[BGil]

BGil is just defensive because he doesn't want to loose his IT job fixing windows boxes

Actually, one of my private consulting businesses is fixing Macs so I'll be okay.

Gotta have that plan B ready at all times.

 

[colocolo]

That's not what I did. Someone asked me why I, personally, perfer PC's and I told them. For most other people I often recommend Macs over PC's because most people aren't into building their own machines and things like that.




I use a Mac a lot and Mac forums are the best way to learn more about them IMO. I've been reading this forum and many others for a longtime and suddenly I got kinda sick of all the misinformation aboiut Longhorn/Vista. I've actually been looking for an intelligent and well structured debate or conversation about new Longhorn or Tiger technologies but it seems no one here wants to have one.

I'm quickly learning that this forum isn't one filled with people who care to know about technology (ya know, geeks) but people who care to know about Macs and very little else. They openly bash products from others even without knowing the slightest thing about them. To me, that kind of behavior is one of the things that Mac users always pointed to when describing PC users who perfer PC's or Windows. What I'm actually finding, is this forum is filled with more blindly lead zealots than any of the PC forums I frequent. I mean, you can go to notebookforums.com, anandtech, avsforums, iexbeta, winbeta, neowin, activewin, arstechnica, or dozens of other PC sites and not see a tenth of the zealotry you find here. Go to anandtech or notebookforums and ask "what kind of laptop should I get for school?". Numerous people will reply with "Powerbook" or "iBook" and there is nary a person there who would bash them for that answer. Try replying to that question here with "IBM Thinkpad" or "Acer" and watch the zealots come out in droves.

I'm starting to think that many people on the PC based forums (anandtech, arstechnica, notebookforums) know more about Macs (and PC's) thna the average poster here knows about Macs. It's amazing to come here and see people who believe that every little upturn in Apple's marketshare is due to the mythical Halo effect and is a sign that Apple is going to "gain major marketshare". Or people who take the word of Steve Jobs (like the Tiger = Longhorn or Longhorn is due late 2006/early2007 nonsense) as if it was written in the bible or koran.

Essientailly, I started posting here because I figured the people here where like me but slightly different. In other words, people who love computers but prefer Macs while I love computers but prefer PC's. Sorely, all I'm finding is a bunch of uninformed zealots here.

I think you should relax a little, for your own sake. I, for one, enjoy having discussions about real products and not ones that I can only read about in forums or by downloading betas where one has to learn to "forgive" many bugs. When Longhonr, Vista or whatever comes out some day (it has been delayed many, many times), with whatever features they manage to put on it for release (again, many features have been cut off, so this isn's some kind of zealot bashing), I will be more than happy to debate, as technically as you want (I'm a software engineer), about its features and compare it to Leopard. Right now, I'll restrain myself to Tiger/XP.

Enjoy your stay here, and don't get so pissed. Life is too short for that.

 

[BGil]

I, for one, enjoy having discussions about real products and not ones that I can only read about in forums or by downloading betas where one has to learn to "forgive" many bugs.

1. I was here after WWDC 2004 and all the talk was about Tiger. no one seemed to have any problems talking about it then (outside of NDA issues) even though my developer preview wouldn't even install on most of the Macs I tried it on.
2. Tiger is still buggy as hell. The only difference between Tiger's final release and Microsoft's public beta system (which they've done for XP, win2003, winXP 64, MSN Messenger 7, WDS, SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and will do for Longhorn Server (Aug 3rd) and Vista Beta 2, RC0, RC1, and RC2) is that one is sold to you for a price and the other is downloadable for free.

If Longhorn/Vista Beta is as stable and bug free as many insiders have claimed then it puts a whole new spin on things. Consider this: Vista Beta 1 is looking like it's going to be a public release (they've only confirmed Longhorn Server as being public though). The first public release quality version of Tiger (10.4.2 IMO) and the first public release quality version of Vista (Beta 1) could ship within a month of each other.
That puts a whole new spin on those Tiger == Longhorn/Vista discussions IMO.

 

[colocolo]

1. I was here after WWDC 2004 and all the talk was about Tiger. no one seemed to have any problems talking about it then (outside of NDA issues) even though my developer preview wouldn't even install on most of the Macs I tried it on.
2. Tiger is still buggy as hell. The only difference between Tiger's final release and Microsoft's public beta system (which they've done for XP, win2003, winXP 64, MSN Messenger 7, WDS, SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and will do for Longhorn Server (Aug 3rd) and Vista Beta 2, RC0, RC1, and RC2) is that one is sold to you for a price and the other is downloadable for free.
.

1.- Of course; its a Mac site, remember? Though i never took part of any discussion of it as I had no facts to support my impressions of it by then, it is hardly an issue to talk about it over here before it was released. besides, it was mainly talking about new features in relation to Panther, not a comparison on how we are better than XP because our operating system that is going to be released a year or so from now has this or that feature. On the other side, we are still more than a year off of Microsoft's claimed release date of Longhorn. Can you see the difference?


2.- Whatever; it still wont be available to general public (unless you are a geek) until late 2006 at best. So, as I said before, let's compare Tiger to XP and Leopard to Longhorn, after they get released and we actually now some facts about both of them.

 

[XNine]

What's NOT accounted for are the amounts of XServes and Customized PPC platforms that organizations such as Lockheed Martin purchase with YellowDog linux on their. At one time,t he biggest purchase EVER of XServes had Yellowdog on it.

The statistics are skewed so far out of wack, it's not even funny.