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Macs at Work

Peter Burrows in the May 12, 2008 BusinessWeek: "The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit:" 

More office workers infatuated with iPods and iPhones are demanding Macs. Is business ready? Is Apple?

Soon after Michele Goins became chief information officer at Juniper Networks (JNPR) in February, she decided to respond to the growing chorus of Mac lovers among the networking company's 6,100 employees. For years, many had used Apple's (AAPL) computers at home and clamored for them in the office as well. So she launched a test, letting 600 Juniper staffers use Macs instead of the standard-issue PCs that run Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows operating system. As long as the extra support costs aren't too high, she plans to open the floodgates. "If we opened it up today, I think 25% of our employees would choose Macs," she says.

Funny thing is, she has never received a single sales call from Apple. While thousands of other companies scratch and claw for the tiniest sliver of the corporate computing market, Apple treats this vast market with utter indifference. After a series of failed offensives by the company in the 1980s and 1990s, Chief Executive Steve Jobs decided to focus squarely on consumers and education customers when he returned to Apple in 1997. As a result, the company doesn't have ranks of corporate salespeople or armies of repairmen waiting to respond every time a hard drive fails. Nothing that could divert his minions from staying focused on Apple's core calling: creating the next cool thing for the world's consumers.

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Posted on Wednesday, May 7, 2008 at 03:08PM by Registered CommenterWilliam Garrity in | CommentsPost a Comment

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