End User Choice Program

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“Almost all of the organizations surveyed in 2016 report an increase in both Mac and iOS device adoption over the previous year and much of this is driven by employee choice.

Nearly half of organizations surveyed (44 percent) give their employees a choice between Mac and PC, with the majority (71 percent) offering a choice between different mobile devices (Apple, Android, etc).

This choice is happening in all sizes of organization. Since implementing an employee choice program in 2015, IBM has deployed nearly 100,000 Macs, making it the world’s largest choice program and Mac deployment. According to IBM’s internal survey, 73 percent of employees say they want a Mac as their next computer.”

https://betanews.com/2017/03/07/enterprise-apple-adoption/

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If I were given a choice, I would take a MAC. Not that I think it is better than Windows (it may, in fact, be better), but because I want to learn it. Having a MAC as my work computer would force me to learn it.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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The results may be perfectly valid, but you have to take into account the fact that the survey was conducted by a company that specializes in Apple support.

https://www.jamf.com/

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@Woody, a point well taken. A good dose of skepticism is a good thing. It does all come down to who commissioned the survey and who got asked. Polls and surveys sponsored by TV networks, magazines and newspapers of their own viewers/readers are the poster-boys for the Borg Assimilation model. You can predict the result 100% of the time.

However, what struck me about this survey was the mere existence of a User Choice Program in companies. I knew that a company that had research or engineering departments quite often used UNIX systems, but the rest of the employees got a Win PC. I worked in systems engineering and always had a Windows PC. There was never a choice. A few years before I retired, the company I worked for brought in the BYOD Program. It targeted mobile devices. It was extremely popular.

I just naturally assumed that it would be a capital cost and support nightmare for a company to let users choose their preferred work system. I checked out that reference to IBM and it is true. I found several other articles today that went further than the one I linked to. It surprised me even more that their IT department got Apple systems at a lower capital cost than Windows PCs and their operating/support costs are significantly lower as well. IBM has a huge research and engineering presence, so getting an entire facility on a single platform may be the story behind the story. Then again, may be not.

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Elly

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Apple has a once-in-a-lifetime window of opportunity here to break into the corporate desktop market, with Microsoft now trying to dictate to their customers rather than letting their customers dictate to them, and with IBM selling the idea of deploying MACs on the corporate desktop.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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