Apple and SMBs, Part 1: The Case for the All-Mac Shop

Today, the phenomenon is even more widespread than before following the recent success of Apple's iPod and iPhone, in particular. "The strength of these edgy and popular devices has translated into a modest uptick for Apple desktops and servers in the corporate environment," Laura DiDio, a research fellow with Yankee Group, told MacNewsWorld.

It's enough to make a small-business owner take pause. Macintosh costs can be higher, at least at first glance, but how do the benefits stack up for the small to medium-sized business (SMB)?

Industry Strengths

There's no doubt that Apple has particularly obvious strengths -- and a larger following -- in certain industries.

"Apple has always been known for its strength and appeal to certain vertical markets, such as education, marketing, graphics and art," DiDio noted.

Macintoshes are also known for being relatively easy to self-manage. "People can often do all their own housekeeping chores," DiDio said.

Part of that self-manageability is a greater level of inherent reliability . "If you take a PC and put it in the company with one application on it and wrap it in protection, it can be a stable environment," Kevin Ford, founder and CEO of Parliant, told MacNewsWorld. "But in a small business, you might play games on your computer at night, or your kids do, and you download all kinds of stuff."

Better Stability

The reality is that Macs provide a much more stable environment, he added. "PC users usually expect applications to hang or crash occasionally and to have to reboot a few times, but the expectation of the Mac user is quite different -- they get outraged when things are not perfect," Ford said.

After two years of making telephony products for both Macs and PCs, Parliant switched to developing purely for the Mac platform. "We were selling 2.5 Mac units for every PC unit, but there were almost 20 to 1 more support calls for the PC version," Ford noted. More than 80 percent of those support calls on the PC side were because of basic operating system issues, he added.

For an SMB , which may or may not have an IT person for support, those extra hassles can add up to a lot. "I have friends with smaller businesses than mine using Windows, and the headaches I hear about I can't even fathom in my own business," Alykhan Jetha, CEO of Marketcircle, told MacNewsWorld. Marketcircle, an all-Mac shop with roughly 25 employees, develops business applications for Mac OS X.

"They'll be approaching a deadline and a virus will come in, for example, and everything stops working," Jetha explained. "If I had problems like that, I'd be throwing the stuff out the window."

Stronger Security

Indeed, security is another aspect on which Macs do particularly well. "By virtue of its niche market status, the Mac is not exploited as much by hackers," DiDio said. "There have been some Mac-specific threats, but not as many as on the Windows side."

The shorter time it takes to bring new users up to speed is another advantage Jetha cites, thanks to Macs' easy configurability and user-friendliness.

"There have been situations where I forgot someone was starting the next day, and I didn't yet have a computer for them," he explained. "I picked up a new iMac, plugged it in, created a user name and password, and within 10 to 15 minutes the person was up and running. That's unheard of on PCs."

Part of that stems from the tight integration between hardware and software, he noted. "It comes down to controlling the whole widget with Apple -- they control the hardware and the software," he explained.

The Application Side

Availability of applications is a feature sometimes cited as a weak area for the Mac, but a few trends are making that argument less compelling, Jonathan Edwards, a research associate also with Yankee Group, told MacNewsWorld.

First, many SMBs are Web-based companies with young, tech-savvy employees. Add to that the increasingly youthful nature of the workforce as a whole and the consumerization of the enterprise , and you'll see the basis of users' desire for control over their computing environments. Part of that trend is increasing demand for Web-based applications that can be accessed from anywhere -- computers at work and home along with mobile devices.

As development of such Web-based applications continues, platform compatibility will become less and less of an issue, he said. "We're moving toward a Web-oriented network application world," Edwards explained. "It will take years, but it will start in SMBs, because they behave much like consumers do. As network applications get better, the distinction between desktop and Web will blend in many ways."

Total Cost of Ownership

Last, but certainly not least, is the cost question. "While prices are coming down, Mac desktops and peripherals are still going to be probably 10 to 15 percent more expensive to buy than Windows equipment," DiDio noted. "For SMBs that could be a factor. Of course, if you want all the advantages, it might be worth it, and shopping around can make a difference."

The hardware costs are just a small part of the total costs, however, Ford noted. Macs may be more expensive initially, but they last longer and require less downtime and training, resulting in a lower total cost of ownership (TCO), he asserted. "To make a choice based on the 2 or 3 percent piece of the iceberg you can see is just silly," he added.

"I've got to be focused on running my business, not worrying about the IT aspects," Jetha agreed. "One of the main reasons I think Macs are better for SMBs is because of the TCO."

Benefits of Unix

Larger SMBs moving to an all-Mac shop will likely need to get some training for their IT people, DiDio said. It may also require that the company switch to different third-party software for some specific applications, such as anti-virus, she added. But for many companies, "the pros will outweigh the cons," she said.

There is a common misconception that because a company is small, it may be less sophisticated and have more limited needs, DiDio pointed out. "But that's not true," she said. "If anything, people in SMBs are much more risk-averse than their enterprise counterparts because they typically don't have the deep pockets. They need the best of breed, and I think the conditions are favorable for Macs."

Unlike the PC world, which started with one program and grew from there, the Unix world was always a departmental system, designed with multitasking protections for multiple users, Ford said. "Because Mac OS 10 is built on a Unix foundation, there's no surprise that it's more stable and anticipates your growth needs better than any other," he concluded. "Does that not sound like something a small business should go to?"

Apple and SMBs, Part 2: The Case for the Xserve