With the barriers lowering, and other market factors creeping in, Macs are slowly making a move into the enterprise. While this may/may not solely be Apple driven, the fact is that people like choices, and the Macs are now far more compatible with other systems than they once were, so finally folks have options. In my recent travels to Woods Hole we had ~14-15 developers from around the world, and there were 4 Macs there. Of course we had the normal thing where someone couldn’t get something working in Windows, Mac folks would chime in with, “just works on a mac” and later when Mac folks couldn’t plug a projector into the certain Macs, the windows folks throw the, “just works in windows”, so it was all in good fun. So while I don’t consider these folks “enterprise” as in working for a corporation, it clearly shows that more people can use what they want, and have IT adapt for their needs. I talked to a friend up there about his MacBook Pro – it’s a beauty of a machine, and he loves it b/c he can do everything he needs, plus run windows for dev work that you can only do in Windows. Of course if I had such a beast it’d be running Linux, and that’s my argument for my buying my Dell laptop; while the Apple is nicer, it was also ~2500$ more than the Dell. Yes, maybe when my work buys me a ‘top I’ll rethink it – but now I’m thinking smaller again – and I really like the Xseries Thinkpads (used be by IBM, but now it’s Lenovo – but the same otherwise) and they’ve always had excellent Linux ability. two devs in WH had those, and I had to borrow them – not to work on them, just to pick them up – nice and light, thin, but with high screen resolution. of course for a full fledged system like thatI could also look at the MacBook which shares most of the Thinkpads features – but for a Mac I’d prefer the black MacBook after my long, drawn out suffering with my old iBook…but I digress. Now, what was the question? Oh yeah, more Macs in the workplace, yeah, it’s how I’ve always said it should be, and it’s more that way now. I run Debian Linux at work now, on my work provided HP desktop machine, on my personal Dell laptop when I bring it, on my Development server, and (soon) on my production server. What kind of support do I need from IT? Gimme an IP and a gateway IP and I’m all set. So, in conclusion, I believe four reasons for Apple’s success with people using more Macs at work is due to the following reasons:
Today at work someone running Windows on a Mac was having an issue communicating through the third party firewall software. The response from the third party was that they don’t support Mac, but my contention is that Mac has nothing to do with someone running Windows, after installing it via Boot Camp. I want to know the answer to this, so I’m posting it here, feel free to educate me if I’m missing something. (Note: names have been changed to protect the (non) supporting party). So, it is my understanding that Boot Camp only installs Windows on a Mac machine (does the partitioning, installs some drivers for the hardware and guides you through installing Windows from an existing CD) after that when you boot the system you can choose Mac’s OS X or Windows, and that after choosing Windows it’s running ‘natively’ on the hardware and not under any kind of virtualization. 
look lout honey, cause I'm using technology
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