Apple Inc. has been gaining ground on the much beligned PC and has seen heightened awareness of it's other products within the Corporate and Government sectors. In a survey of corporate desktop operating system trends published in August 2008, Forrester Research found that since October 2006, use of Apple products among its clients had grown from 1.1 to 4.5 percent," Merrill Douglas reports for Government Technology. This compared to a recent BBC article which cites Apple as now holding roughly 10% of the computer retail market. It's in effect a serious leap forward from the mid 1990's, when the Mac was seen more as defacto for graphic design and music production.
"Among computer users at large, the Cupertino, California, company is doing even better. Apple claimed 9.5 percent of the U.S. personal computer market in the third quarter of 2008, according to figures released in October 2008 by Gartner. That's a 29 percent increase over 2007," Douglas reports. This, seems to pretty much ring true when you look at consumer sentiment towards the Mac- without being Biased, the humble PC looks to be lagging in many secotrs of this highly creative and fast moving industry.
"A growing trend toward 'consumerization' in the workplace has seen more employees asking for the IT products they prefer, or simply bringing in products they buy themselves. 'That has given rise to a greater number of Apple products being part of the enterprise ecosystem,' said Charles Smulders, managing vice president of Gartner's End User Client Computing Group,"The creation of loopholes within the security infrastructure of a business aside, this could have the added benifit of improving motivation among many professional workers.
when asked about Apple's ubiquitous phone technology, Vivek Kundra, Washington DC's chief technology officer (CTO) stated that: "Applications that use publicly available data are right for the iPhone. As a result, Washington, D.C., is deploying [Apple's iPhones] in several pilot implementations. 'Most of what government does is in the public domain,' he said.
"The district started testing iPhone applications after a local resident submitted one to the Apps for a Democracy competition. Contestants were invited to create applications using data feeds from the district's Data Catalog, which offers public information on everything from juvenile arrests and transit schedules to recent road kill pickups," Douglas reports. "Police officers, teachers and employees in the Office of the CTO (OCTO) have been experimenting with the iPhones... The consumerist ethos also has persuaded OCTO to make Macs available to city employees who want them."
