The Consumerization of Business is Inevitable

This past week I won a long fought battle at my work and got approval to buy some more Macs for the design team and even a MacBook Pro for our CEO. So in the past year we’ve bought 4 27inch iMacs, 2 Mac Pros, a MacMini server for our video studio, and a MacBook Pro 13inch plus Hengedock for the CEO. Interestingly enough I can trace back the exact two moments in which Microsofts corporate/enterprise products lost their grip with our CEO the day I switched us over to Google Apps Premier and when he started using Gmail in the browser. He loved it! The second nail in Microsofts coffin was the iPad. When our CEO got his hands on my iPad he was enamored. History aside it got me thinking how did I  win this battle? Why allow the switch? What changed that made Mac’s a more businessy machine for our company?

Despite my love for Mac’s in no way would you consider it an enterprise machine, they’re expensive meaning buying in bulk is costly, theres a slight learning curve in moving away from Windows, and yes there are some apps that dont work (allthough thats why I’ve moved almost every productivity task over to webapps so thats moot). But there is one thing that the Mac does have that businesses love…. it just works.

We’re a small but growing company of about 15 employees, besides being the web designer and developer I’m also the resident geek and naturally the de-facto head of IT which means I don’t have time to squash Windows bugs or fix things that really should just work. Our CEO knows that hence the switch. So let me get to the point, Macs are built for consumers; they just work so consumers are happy after all consumers dont have IT departments. And thats where we’re moving with business information technology. Products built for consumers maybe not in what they do but how they work. Want another example? Take a look at 37signal’s products. Now Basecamp isn’t something your mom needs but she could absolutely start using it after about 30 minutes of playing around. How about Google Apps? Besides being far more cost effective than in-house or even offsite Exchange servers their products namely Gmail is so far and beyond easier to use than Outlook. Outlook has feature bloat, Gmail doesnt. At it’s simplest form Gmail is a great mail app, and with the power of labs you can get all those great features of Outlook but they don’t get in your way. Gmail is a very very consumer friendly mail client and it turns out a very very business friendly mail client.

I’m not saying Microsoft is doomed, we still have 6 PC’s versus our 9 Macs, but it certain needs to rethink how it does business with businesses.