Re: Morgan Stanley: 40% of college students plan to buy Macs

In article <Oo-dnZDYtuoAs27anZ2dnUVZ_u2mnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Steve de Mena <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

ZnU wrote:
In article <UISdna6DN67orGzanZ2dnUVZ_tyknZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Steve de Mena <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

ZnU wrote:
In article <HKqdnZ8PWs6Y-HDanZ2dnUVZ_gOdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Steve de Mena <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Chance Furlong wrote:
From Apple Insider:

http://tinyurl.com/2nn447

Cuss and discuss, Wintrolls. You can respond too, zara, but I doubt you
will, since I sent you running with your tail between your legs.

I love it here!

Morgan Stanley: 40% of college students plan to buy Macs
Unfortunately a 40% "plan to buy" will not equal a 40% "will buy".
Compatibility with future work environments, etc, will be a major factor.
Could you explain precisely what "Compatibility with future work
environments, etc" means in this context and why it's relevant to a
college student picking a computer?

There still seems to be this odd notion in the advocacy world that if
your office uses Windows machines, you should as well. This may have
made sense 15 years ago, when people mainly had computers at home to do
the same sorts of things they did at work (often explicitly to take work
home with them), and when cross-platform compatibility wasn't all that
strong. It appears to have little relationship to reality in a world
where cross-platform compatibility is quite high for most office type
tasks, and where people now frequently use their personal computers for
very different types of tasks than their work computers.

Well, when your company only supports VPN access via a specific
Windows version of the VPN client then that cross-compatability goes
out the window. And with Microsoft's new version of Office dropping
VBA, forgot any cross-compatability there (besides the fact Entourage
doesn't support the same addins as Outlook and acts nothing like it).
VISIO? I could go on and on.

I doubt these considerations apply to more than a few percent of the US
workforce.

I would think 50% or more of large corporations are dependent on some
Windows-only features such as Project, Visio, VBA, Exchange server
features only supported on Outlook clients. Or have company intranet
sites that only function in Internet Explorer 6. Not Firefox. Not
Safari.

Sure. But large corporations only account for a bit less than half of
the employment in the US, and even many employees at large firms either
won't take work home with them at all, don't need to take home work that
requires the above technologies (e.g. they'll take home Word files to
edit, but they don't need to access Project from home), or will have a
company-issued laptop which they won't necessarily use (or sometimes
even be permitted to use) for their personal computing.

Most corporate types I know have their BlackBerries for company e-mail,
and edit reports and presentations when out of the office, but don't
otherwise have much out-of-the-office contact with work-related IT
infrastructure.

And then on top of all of this, there's the little fact that Macs can
run Windows now, which *really* torpedos the notion that someone
shouldn't buy a Mac because they need to be Windows-compatible for work.

--
"More than two decades later, it is hard to imagine the Revolutionary War coming
out any other way."
                        --George W. Bush in Martinsburg, W. Va., July 4, 2007
.

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