BusinessWeek: The Mac in the Grey Flannel Suit

More fuel for the “Macs in the corporate world” debate.

Interesting things to note:

- Juniper Networks is letting 10% of their workforce use Macs on a trial basis. Their CIO guesses that about 25% of the company would use a Mac if they opened the floodgates.

- 87% of companies surveyed recently had at least some Macs in their offices, as opposed to 48% two years ago.

- CEO Scott Kriens at Juniper is quoted as saying: “It’s not anything to do with negative perceptions about Microsoft. It’s just that Macs are cool.”

- CIO of Dimension Data Mark Slaga says: “Steve Jobs doesn’t need a [corporate] sales force because he already has one: employees like the ones in my company.”

- The article makes a case that Apple is too secretive to make serious relationships with corporations. This seems like a fair statement to me.

The funny thing is, the more I think about it, the less I think Apple really wants to be part of the corporate world. This doesn’t mean that they won’t continue to sell computers to corporations; I just don’t think they care specifically about the corporate market.

The truth is, if they can satisfy consumers at home, they will continue to be successful; the corporate market is just icing on what is turning out to be a very sweet cake for Apple.