Warning - Long response follows :-)
All of this really depends on which Kool-Aid you found tastiest. :-) To
some, Apple's vertical integration feels comforting, and the premium price
they pay for admittance to the walled garden is worth it. To others, the
flexibility and range of choices offered by Windows and the generally
greater "bang for the buck" is far preferable. And to yet another group
(this writer being one of it) some distribution of Linux far outshines
either. Throw in the increasing adoption of Android, and its cousin,
Chrome, and you're probably quite likely to find something that you like.
If 35 years in the computer business has taught me anything, it's that the
choice you make ultimately becomes a matter of religious conversion for
many (most?). That initial choice is rarely made on a pragmatic basis,
something that the marketeers for Apple and Microsoft (and now Google, and
others) know all too well.
Some observations (from the organizational, not consumer)...
Much of the reason that you find the corporate world so heavily invested in
Windows is for two reasons, IMO. First, 1-2-3. The spreadsheet program,
custom-built by Lotus for the IBM PC (betting the company on IBM's future
success), was the killer app that drove corporate customers, by the literal
millions, to the PC. Second, this established IBM's device as the defacto
standard, and that's a tough position to beat. Once the BIOS had been
reverse engineered, the public disclosure of all the rest of the PC's
technical specs (enabling a flood of inexpensive, compatible clones)
virtually ensured its overwhelming adoption. Gates & Co. understood (and in
many cases, drove) this trend, and have ridden it quite successfully for
decades.
Add to that the fact that Apple has never learned how to "play nice" in the
corporate world (a fact to which I can testify by repeated professional
exposure), you can begin to see why it's been a niche player. Apple's
recent successes are driven by consumer devices (iPod and iPhone, then
iPad) and the walled garden. It's so deucedly annoying to try and get real
horizontal integration with any of Apple's devices and the "rest of the
world", in any meaningful sense, that committing to Apple means one
eventually submits fully. One can thank Steve Jobs for this, just as much
as Bill Gates is responsible for the Microsoft/PC alignment. Jobs was far
more interested in the aesthetics and "how computing should be done" than
is Gates, and no amount of coercion was going to sway Steve from that
vision to pursue market share.
You'll note that neither of the above requires either to be a "better"
platform, nor possessing technical excellence that sets it apart from the
other.
What's really the case, however, is that it's the software that ultimately
drives the hardware purchasing, because what a given group of people become
comfortable with is what will rule--in that environment--regardless of the
real reason that "standard" was adopted. There's huge inertia in the sheer
mass of people that already "know Windows". Trying to get people retrained
to another platform is tremendously expensive, not only in terms of
training costs, but also in terms of lost productivity. Going to a better,
faster, technically more advanced or less expensive alternative doesn't
trump those costs--unless or until that alternative is so compelling--and
provides such a clear advantage--that it cannot be ignored.
And don't just take my word for it, have a read of Mark Stephens' (under
the pen name of Robert X. Cringely) very readable (and entertaining!)
"Accidental Empires". It turns out he's serialized it, here:
http://www.cringely.com/2013/02/04/accidental-empires-part-1/
Written in the 90's, it's a great account of why "personal computing" went
the direction it did.
Most of the choices made by those not intimately involved in the care and
feeding of all this stuff are are made in virtual ignorance. Schools often
opt for Apple devices simply because many have been around since Apple used
to almost give away early hardware to schools, and those who remember that
are now in a decision making position. Corporations most often buy PCs (of
one flavor or another) because someone in the right decision making
position has a (non-technical!) reason for buying that of one vendor or
another, but just as often because they think that they've given themselves
the right amount of flexibility in case they should need to change.
What I have seen, consistently over years mostly on the support side of the
computer industry, is that most people don't know much about their
respective system choices at all. All they really know is how to manipulate
the machine for those few tasks that they happen to do on a regular basis.
You find this out when trying to support someone over the telephone when
you cannot see what they are doing. They don't know the names for the
various physical parts of the machine. They don't know the names for the
things they see on screen. They cannot accurately tell a support technician
what is happening for those reasons, and also because they usually do not
read what's actually in front of them, but only what they think is
important to note. They do not pay attention, really, to what the machine
actually is doing (or did), but rather to what they wanted it to do, or
thought it should have done.
All the above said, people without the "advantage" of all the
PC/Windows-Apple history are a different breed. Kids increasingly don't
give a damn what device or O/S they use, and most importantly, switch
between them without batting an eye. The average kindergartener comes into
school already knowing something of iOS and Android, simply by exposure to
parents' cell phones. Lots of kids get old smartphones, operational but for
the calling plan, as playthings before they can walk. They know the
interface to devices like televisions, game consoles, and a host of other
electronic devices, and are used to having to explore any of them and
figure out how to get them to do what they want. Third graders routinely
understand Mac, Windows or Linux in less than a day with greater facility
than those "teaching" them. They switch from one device to another--and
from one program to another--easily. It's been my opinion for some time now
that this means a huge change in the landscape of computing that many of
the current major players will not survive--at least not in the way we see
them at present.
What I wish I knew, with at least enough certainty to know where to place
my money, was which of a number of trends will predominate. Figuring that
out early could make one wealthy. :-)
---
Scott
On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 6:26 PM, Ken Norton <ken@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 15000 employees. Probably less than 50 Apple computers. Other employer this
> past year has 45000 employees with probably fewer Apples.
>
> As we're a bunch of technical geeks, we're more often than not Android
> users too.
> On Jun 17, 2014 7:09 PM, "Sawyer, Edward" <Ed.Sawyer@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > Maybe in your corporate world. But then again I don't live in flyover
> > country....
> >
> > On Jun 17, 2014, at 6:18 PM, "olympus-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <
> > olympus-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > > Which also explains why Apple has near zero penetration in the
> corporate
> > world
> > --
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