Enterprise Will Spend $19 Billion on Apple Hardware in 2012
Things have changed greatly in the time I've been in the job market. When I first sat down at a corporate desk, it was a serious offense to bring your own hardware into the workplace. I'm not sure that anyone ever actually got fired over that, but the warnings coming from IT were strongly-worded. In essence, if you brought your Mac to work you could expect to be mocked in the short term and out of work in the long term.
What changed this was the mobile revolution; corporate IT can control what you put on your desk, but they can't mandate what you carry in your pocket. iPhones were obvious even in Windows-heavy environments, and then when the executives caught the wave and started wondering out loud why they couldn't get their business email on their smartphone, the genie was out of the bottle.
Never say never, but I'll say it anyway -- we're never going back. Partly this is due to corporate cheapness; most people I know have better hardware at home (and in their pocket) than the cheapo HP/Dell they use on the job, and unless the business wants to step up and improve the quality of the computers (and phones) they hand out, they are never going to convince the workforce to take a step back in terms of speed, stability, and quality of user experience. Better instead to bow to the inevitable and find a way to support what employees will be doing anyway: using their technology of choice, in the ways that they choose to do so.
