Snow Leopard Not A Game Changer: The View From IT

Enterprise IT executives say they're stuck with Windows, despite Snow Leopard's support for Microsoft Exchange. SMBs, on the other hand, have more freedom to accommodate their employees' preferences.A couple of posts ago, I stated that I didn't think that the concurrent releases of Snow Leopard and Windows 7 were going to do much to change the trendline for the adoption of Macs. What I was focusing on was the idea that Windows 7 would slow the adoption of Macs, but the implication was also that Snow Leopard wouldn't necessarily speed it up.

In the same vein, bMighty editor Fred Paul recently asked me, in a comment to one of his posts, "what, if anything, will it take to make the Mac relevant to the vast majority of small and midsize companies?" My reply was that the question really meant, what would make the majority of small and midsize companies choose Macs over Windows PCs? I know businesses of all sizes have some very good and some not-so-good reasons for choosing PCs. A recent survey by TechRepublic of U.S. IT executives gives some insight into that decision process, much of which no doubt applies to SMBs as well.

Most of the good reasons offered by TechRepublic's 12-person "jury," when asked "Does the release of Snow Leopard make your IT department more likely to adopt more Mac OS X machines?" (all 12 said "no") had to do with being tied to specific software:

"We have many applications that are Windows specific." "[The] majority of our users and applications still require Windows." "Its a matter of our key software vendors not supporting anything other than Windows for our core applications." "A lot of the applications we use...are not supported by Mac." "Our main application does not run in Mac OS." No one, not even the most diehard Mac fanboi, can really argue with reasons like those. (Well, the most diehard Mac fanboi can argue with anything -- let's forget about him.) If your business depends on software that doesn't run on a Mac, it would be foolish to choose Macs as your computing platform.

But a less valid reason is that "it would still take too much time and investment to retrain users and support staff." Windows and Mac OS X are enough alike at this point, and common applications so frequently duplicated across platforms, that retraining, in either direction, would be minimal. For me, I think migrating users from Windows Word 2003 to 2007 probably required more retraining than moving them to Mac Word 2008 would have, even given the need to learn their way around OS X. And judging from years of anecdotal reports, businesses with Macs find that they require fewer support staff, which should offset the costs of retraining the ones left.

A few of the jury's answers run more to "no, but" than a firm "no way." Tom Galbraith, Director of IT for US District Court So District of IL, told Tech Republic, "We are taking a more accepting approach to Macs in general. As new and younger personnel enter our organization, and as an increasing number of applications are running in the browser, the OS is is becoming less relevant. Thus, we are being more open to the requests of our user community as long as there are no significant barriers and/or potential degradations to our overall infrastructure in doing so.

The advantage to SMBs here, once again, is that the inertia behind a lot of the "no" answers, whether well informed or otherwise, isn't as big a drag on decision-making. That leaves small- and midsize-business decisionmakers better able to choose the platform that best meets their needs, and to support the wishes of incoming workers. And the willingness to accommodate an employee's OS preference could prove a real hiring advantage. From that perspective, the Mac couldn't be more relevant.