So there is some serious potential business proposition to using Mac computers in the small business, in the medium bus… or in the enterprise I should say. What the Windows world focuses on right off the top and they’ve got a couple legitimate arguments. One, this is now not even talking about the cost of an Apple machine compared to a Windows PC. Let’s just put that off though a whole separate debate.
The first argument they got was well, the Mac doesn’t run the business software that we need to run. True enough, 95 percent of business applications out there require a Windows to run on, ok? It’s just a fact of life. They’re written to run on Windows. Now, that is starting to change, thank to software and service, alright? Zoho and Google and all the others out there, that’s starting to change. Microsoft is going to have their own cloud-based Office application. So if they can run in a browser, then that’s not, that’s suddenly becoming more and more of a mute point. But a lot of smaller companies use older software. They buy a software package they get the way they want it and they don’t change. They still use that thing for years and years and years. And they’re not going to, you know, that’s going to be a problem. They’re going to try… they continue to try to find the hardware that will run that software package because maybe they’re in special business, and they paid a lot of money for an engineering application or something like that. In fact, Macintosh can’t run if they’re not going to buy it. So that’s a very real, real consideration -- legacy application support. If the Mac can’t run it, we’re not going to buy it. We know that an XP box will run it just fine. The Mac, don’t ask me a problem. At a course not everybody is going to jump on, on the software and service bandwagon. They’re just not going to do it.
2:34 – 2:36, how are you doing? Welcome to today’s show, always good to have you here. They’re not going to jump to those hoops. They’re not going to spend the money. We can’t blame them. Alright so that’s one area of resistance they run into.
Secondly, is support, a lot of the companies when they have their own IT Department, most, and I’m not trying to do a gross generalization here, but a lot them, their IT staff is very well-versed in the world of Windows, they don’t know really Macintosh. They don’t want to support two different systems. They want to standardize on their equipment and have everything down pat and dry to a process. If you bring in a Mac, it’s a different, different thing to support so they don’t want. Is it laziness? Maybe. Maybe it’s a practical issue, you know, when you can bring 30 workstations online, you created, you know, you image a drive and you pop them in there and take off, ask what they want to do. So they really don’t want to spend the money on supporting Macs and Windows. It’s got nothing to do what the machines cost to begin with.
So this is another valid argument that the industry, the small, the mid-size companies, anybody comes up with. They don’t want to support two platforms. They’re going to support… if they’re going to support another platform, maybe we would support the Linux platform over something like a Boot 2 or a Fedora, something like that, before we would necessarily support Macintosh. So those are kind of the couple big arguments that lead to that resistance of using Macs in the marketplace. And then you can throw in on top of everything else, it costs us a lot more money to acquire Macs up front, than it does buying Windows boxes, you know, because they are a commodity. Windows boxes are very much a commodity, you know, you can buy them cheap. You can run them a few years, don’t hate them, don’t you get rid of them. Don’t hate them to cheer you whatever you get any machines and of course small businesses will run them, a PC until it just absolutely won’t work anymore.
So is the hardware cost really the issue keeping Macs in the workplace? I don’t think so. I think that is going to be an on-going battle for Apple to make any real headway in the business community. I think it will get better over time. I would like to see, I think, very much I would love to see Mac Pros between that 1500’s to 2000 dollar price range. That will help a lot. The entry fee for Mac Pro is around 2500 bucks now. I had on up, so that will extremely help if there was a computer that was between the i-Mac and the Mac Pro, that it’s almost Apple needs to develop a machine that can be as reasonably priced they can go into the small business basin and be justifiable. Their days is… but they’re doing better, and they’re going to continue to make small in-rows into the business. But Windows Seven, so much was riding on Widows Seven, being successful, working right, Microsoft had a lot posed on it and fortunately for Microsoft, I don’t think they’re going to blow Windows Seven like they did Vista and that I think is a game changer with Apple’s designs on the small, mid-size enterprise.
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