Macs Growing in Small Business

AppleInsider:

Reporting back to investors, Needham Co. analyst Charlie Wolf notes that Apple moved from selling just 61,000 Macs to small businesses in the spring to 188,000 in the three months of Apple’s summer quarter ended in September.

The gain boosted Apple’s share of the field from a modest 1.9 percent during the earlier season to a significant 5.6 percent in summer. It was enough to not only give Apple a new level of influence but also to carry the company through a tough period: where Mac shipments to regular home buyers suddenly cooled in growth from 53.6 percent quarter-to-quarter from the spring to just 9.1 percent in the summer, the small business spike represented nearly all of Apple’s Mac growth at about 97 percent of systems leaving warehouses and shelves.

Such a rapid move is odd for Apple, which has often fought to make any headway in a normally Windows-dominated crowd; it’s inexplicable enough that Wolf himself doesn’t have a simplified answer.

“After years when the Mac’s share of this market barely budged, the increase was so abrupt that there are no obvious explanations for it,” he says.

For those of us in the Apple Authorized Service Provider world, this isn’t surprising. We’re seeing a similar thing. More and more businesses are using the Macintosh. I see several reasons for this:

1. More people use Macs at home than ever before. Those people want the same reliability and ease-of-use at work that they enjoy at home. (This doesn’t count the thousands of college students who use Macs that will want them on their desks at their jobs in the next few years.)

2. Macs can play with Windows. The move to Intel lets Macs run Windows. Most customers we have use XP virtual machines for the handful of apps that don’t support OS X. (Surprisingly, not a lot of business people I know use Boot Camp – I think the rebooting gets old fast.) As more developers realize the Mac isn’t going anywhere, I think we’ll see even PC-only apps come to the platform. But as I write this, I can only think of a handful of apps that lots of people depend on that are PC-only. The number is shrinking.

3. Macs can do Exchange. While the next version of OS X promises full Exchange support for Mail, iCal and Address Book, Entourage 2008 gets the job done quite well for most users.

4. The iPhone Halo Effect. The iPod brought consumers to the Mac in the early 00s. The iPhone 3G is bringing them to the Mac in 2008. For example, our office is mostly PC. But even hardcore Windows guys want an iPhone for company business. The iPhone is so dang sexy, it sucks people into the Apple world.

5. Style. Macs look great. Businessmen and women drool over the MacBook Air. It’s weird… like really thin, metal sex.

6. Reliability is the Mac’s middle name. OS X is simply a better OS than XP or Vista, long-term. With viruses and malware basically a non-issue for Mac users, businesses can feel less worried about their computers coming down with something. And since Apple controls the hardware and the software, Macs run better, longer.