Apple, IT, and cloud computing

June 26, 2008 (Computerworld) - Nearly 80% of businesses have Macs in-house, nearly double the percentage that said they had users running Mac OS X two years ago, a research firm said today.

"Then, we were talking about onesies and twosies," said Laura DiDio, a research fellow atYankee Group Research Inc. who conducted a survey of more than 700 senior IT administrators and C-level executives. "Now the number of actual users is very significant. A number of the businesses said that they had 50 or 100 or even several thousand Macs deployed."

The article notes that Apple makes the advances despite little effort to break into the business marketplace. It goes on with a bunch of usage statistics that completely miss the point; Apple isn't succeeding in the business marketplace because of changes to the Mac. It's succeeding because of changes to the nature of business computing.

If you buy the arguments in Nicholas Carr's new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, then we are moving to Information Technology as a service rather than a core business function, and we're migrating it to the web.

I'm going to keep my views on the irrelevance of Windows domains to another post, but if you just look at Google Apps' offerings, then you can see how inexpensive and easy it is to move e-mail, shared calendaring and resource scheduling, user provisioning, and file storage/editing to the web. If we're doing that -- and I think that were both are and should -- then all that an end user needs is a browser and a very basic application set.

This is why Apple's business market is growing. It doesn't take an IT department to keep an employee productive on a Mac if their primary application is just a browser. Just hand them a laptop and they're pretty self sufficient.

I know that most organizations aren't there yet, but I'm convinced that it's the future.