I'm going to tell just a few little stories to illustrate my point.
I used to work for Andersen Consulting (now know as Accenture). The most commonly cited reason for not liking Apple at Accenture was \"we don't want to be tied to a single vendor\". A very reasonable proposition. However, you couldn't buy a PC at AC unless it was manufactured by Compaq. What's more, you couldn't buy any Compaq, but only a certain specific subset of Compaqs that were engineered for The Enterprise (i.e. unlike most Compaqs they were actually made of standardised parts so that you could swap in replacements or install a preconfigured OS without installing drivers). And of course you couldn't buy any OS, development tools, or Office products, unless it was from Microsoft. And you couldn't use any server software, unless it was from Novell. So we were tied to a single hardware vendor, a single OS vendor, and a single server vendor.
One of the clients I worked at was AMP (then the largest enterprise in Australia, I think it was the largest in the southern hemisphere). Every year they paid for TCO (total cost of ownership) studies. Every year it showed PCs cost about 50% more per seat than Macs and vastly more than X terminals. The reason they didn't go for X terminals was that sufficiently many users wanted to install specific software on their computers that you'd need to make too many exceptions. The reason they didn't choose Macs was they hated Apple and would never buy anything from them. They just came out and said so.","$updatedAt":"2024-06-05T10:51:20.746+00:00",path:"apple-the-enterprise-",_created:"2024-07-09T20:34:12.931Z",id:"47",_modified:"2024-07-09T20:34:12.931Z","$id":"47",_path:"post/path=apple-the-enterprise-"}}