THE GIST

Gist: The busi­ness mar­ket share of Mac sys­tems is increas­ing and this trend is accel­er­at­ing. The cur­rent mar­ket­share is of 4.5% (see exhibit sec­tion below).

Ori­gins: The pop­u­lar­ity of the con­sumer devices (iPod and iPhone) lead to a halo effect ben­e­fit­ing Mac com­put­ers. Increas­ingly cheap, easy to use and pol­ished vir­tu­al­iza­tion tech­nolo­gies make the switch seam­less by allow­ing to run a Win­dows VM on a Mac system.

At Stake: Orga­ni­za­tions seek­ing to attract and retain top tal­ent should rec­og­nize the fact that tal­ent today, espe­cially Gen Y tal­ent, will flow to the orga­ni­za­tions pro­vid­ing them the best work­ing con­di­tions to be highly pro­duc­tive. That in turn means run­ning a Mac sys­tem, for an increas­ing share of this tal­ent pool. Not pro­vid­ing this flex­i­bil­ity means you forgo one strong com­pet­i­tive advan­tage your com­peti­tors may offer.

Action­able ?: Cap­i­tal­ize on the con­sumer­iza­tion of IT and the vir­tu­al­iza­tion advances and offer employ­ees a choice of hard­ware de-connected from your choices of busi­ness sys­tems softwares.

MORE DETAILS

Ori­gins

• Vir­tu­al­iza­tion: the pos­si­bil­ity to run seam­lessly legacy win­dows appli­ca­tions on a Mac OS X means switch­ing car­ries no risk for pro­duc­tive work­ers: at worst, they use all their legacy apps on the Win­dows vir­tual machine. At best, they use all the Mac OS stack, save the cou­ple, man­dated, appli­ca­tions that run only on Windows.
• Media capa­bil­i­ties of Mac OS X: as the need to use more and in a bet­ter way media com­po­nents in pre­sen­ta­tions is increas­ingly rec­og­nized, so does the media capa­bil­i­ties of OS X.
• Halo effect from iPod and iPhone: clas­sic halo effect, accel­er­ates with the iPhone.
• Increased con­sumer mar­ket­share: not to be con­fused by a halo effect. Busi­ness exec­u­tives buy­ing a mac for home use and then bring­ing it to work are more and more com­mon (lat­est esti­mate is a yearly Mac growth of 25–29 %).

At Stake/Actionable ?

Strat­egy

Sin­gle most impor­tant impact of this trend will be to dis­crim­i­nates fur­ther in terms of tal­ent attrac­tion and reten­tion. The main dif­fer­ence between Mac and Win­dows OS is their sup­port to the cre­ative knowl­edge work­ers. As these posi­tions become more and more where com­pet­i­tive advan­tage is cre­ated or lost, and more and more dif­fi­cult to fill (attract and retain), access to the best tools will dis­crim­i­nate. We can all view the OSs the way we want. An increas­ing share of this tal­ent pool wants to be as pro­duc­tive as they can be, and they don’t see how to achieve this on a Win machine.

Cor­po­rate

Fol­lows the strat­egy axis: IT needs to sup­port HR for this. If IT is allowed to rule in this domain by say­ing “No, not pos­si­ble”, then tal­ent attrac­tion will be sub-optimal.

Actions here ? IT needs to seek the best flex­i­bil­ity / stan­dard­iza­tion trade-off. But no, one OS isn’t acceptable.

Example(s)/Exhibit(s)

Use cases:

• IBM launches a pilot pro­gram to bring Macs inside: the highly pos­i­tive results direct from IBM (86% of the pilot users pre­ferred to keep their Mac at the end) and a more strate­gic view
• Anec­do­tal evi­dence of how Mac switch­ing spreads in a SME (Roger Ehren­berg)
• Anec­do­tal evi­dence in the finance indus­try (Excel mam­moth user, so inter­est­ing to see a trend there as well), direct from Equity Private

Exhibits:

• Cor­po­rate Desk­top Oper­at­ing Sys­tem Trends, Q4 2007 Through Q2 2008, For­rester report, August 22th 2008