Tuesday 8 July 2008

The start of a trend?

From MacWorld:

Huge newspaper makes Mac switch move - Mac - Macworld UK:

One of Europe's largest newspaper publishers, Axel Springer AG, has announced plans to migrate its 10,000 employees and 150 newspapers in 30 countries to the Mac

Speaking in a video message that's now available through YouTube, company CEO Mathias Döpfner notes the following four reasons for the shift:

  • 'Most of the company’s layout work was already being done on Macs
  • 'Macs are more user friendly than other computers
  • 'Apple creates the most elegant computers
  • 'Macs are cheaper to buy and easier to maintain than they were in the past.'

Could this be the start of a trend? I'm not expecting an avalanche of such announcements in the near future, but the world is changing. Microsoft seem to be suffering from horrendous PR problems at the moment, with people (regardless of the reality of the situation) starting to view them as dazed and confused. I saw a magazine cover the other day which posed (if I remember correctly) the question: "The end for Microsoft?".

The $64000 question for me is "are Apple really any better than Microsoft?" I think the jury is still out on that one...

1 comment:

Unknown said...

As an end user tool, I would be surprised if the Mac was *really* any better than a Windoze PC - most users stick to a very small number of applications needed to do their job.

But the 'style factor' and 'being different' counts for something too.

Note the final quote in your list:
Macs are cheaper to buy and easier to maintain than they were in the past
They still aren't anywhere near as cheap as a business-spec PC for company purchase.
Cost/value equation would depend on any existing support/maintenance skills though - if already got in-house *Nix/Mac expertise, that's fine, but if there is a need to set up that level of support, it is an extra cost up front. Maybe paid back over time, compared to endless Windows updates/tweaks/fixes...