By 2011, Apple will double its market share in the US and Europe -- a trend that will also mean an onslaught of Apple devices invading corporate networks, new research predicts.
According to analyst firm Gartner, Apple's rapid growth over recent years will see the company take nine percent of the US and Western European personal computing market within the next three years.
Besides the "coolness of its design", Gartner analysts cite Apple's stronger multi-device offerings and better support as the key factors contributing to the Mac maker's projected growth.
While Microsoft is named as the company most threatened by Apple's increasing market share, Apple's desktop hardware competitors such as Dell and HP will also suffer as a result, the analysts believe.
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One area that has to date remained immune to Apple's invasion is the enterprise, due largely to the estimate that 70 percent of a typical business's applications depend on a Windows-operating environment. However, Gartner expects that by 2011 around half of all business applications will be system "agnostic".
But it is Apple's portable devices that IT managers will need to watch out for, with a mushrooming number of requests to connect Apple products to corporate networks on the horizon, as workers begin using the devices as a means to transport their desktop environment from work to home.
By 2012, Gartner estimates that 50 percent of the labour force will choose to leave their laptops at home in favour of carrying smaller devices, such as iPods or USB sticks that can recreate a worker's desktop environment anywhere. These portable devices, which already pose a problem for companies concerned about data leakage, will increasingly cause problems in the enterprise until they can be systematically and centrally secured.
Yet another factor that will see Apple devices making a mark in the corporate environment is the trend towards employees providing their own portable computers, according to Gartner. Since the popularity of Apple devices, desktops and laptops is being driven by consumers, this too will contribute to greater use of Apple products as business tools, the analysts believe.
... because their network management tools and faclities stink. They're buggy, limited, and not very compatible across versions. Roaming profiles are slow and can cause werid app quirks, OpenDirectory user/machine management is buggy, etc. It's about as far from Windows network management (which can be hard, but very powerful and reliable).
The ability to drop down a layer and manage it like a UNIX box is useful to a fair extent, but won't work around all the bugs. Apple have done a reasonable job of providing command line interfaces to all their custom stuff, but a terrible job of documenting it.
What's perhaps the worst issue is that Apple have little interest in their software if it's more than two revisions old. No security patches. No support, even if it's just support for getting the blasted thing to talk to the XServe it talked *just* *fine* to before the 10.4 update was installed. Of course, if your hardware won't run the latest or next-to-latest software revision, I guess you'll just have to upgrade.
This is a hopeless environment for a business network, making things like app compatibility a nightmare. Mac OS X is fairly forward-compatible, but a two-version jump seems to be worse than the XP->Vista move for the apps I've been using (though I actually find vista OK ... maybe 'cos I'm a geek who knows to to kick it in the right places).
I actually quite like Mac OS X for some things, but I really don't want it on my business network until it learns to play well on the network, it's supportable for a five-plus year period, and it gives me the same level of network management and control I get with Windows workstations.
I have similar complaints about Linux thin clients, by the way... they're cool in many ways, and I use them (and Mac OS X) at work, but their management absolutely stinks.