Crunch time for platform decisions

Will an Apple a day seed new revenues and keep resellers healthy?

Yardley: It doesn't matter whether a PC is better than a Mac, or vice versa

Despite the universally high profile that Apple maintains with the success of the iPod and the iPhone, the Mac still has less than a 10 per cent share of the workstation market. Is the brand really worth bothering about? I think so and here’s why.

Many resellers and systems integrators take a black-and-white view about getting involved with the Mac. A common view is that the benefit of understanding Apple technologies can at best yield a 10 per cent increase in available market. In short, the cost of finding or training people with Apple expertise would not be justified in extra sales.

As managing director of a company that sells software for both Macs and PCs in about equal quantities and for over 20 years, I would argue that the sum of the parts is significantly greater than the whole. Any reseller with cross-platform offerings will do far better than one that specialises in just one or the other.

It does not matter which is better
I will avoid the trap of trying to argue whether a Mac is ‘better’ than a PC or vice versa. It simply doesn’t matter; it is what the customers buy that matters. And by customers I mean businesses, not home consumers.

I can’t find any data on what percentage of businesses have at least one Apple workstation, but from our experience I would estimate it is pretty much 100 per cent.

And whether they run one Mac and 50 PCs or vice versa, they still have a cross-platform environment, and often the minority users are the most vociferous and demanding. They are simply not prepared to go along with everyone else, and clearly they are important enough to get their own way.

Apart from the fact that resellers don’t want to shoot themselves in the foot by saying ‘sorry, we don’t do’ Macs or PCs, there are technical reasons that knowledge of both systems is important. For a start, workers on the same network usually want to exchange data, and data is not the same for both platforms.

Macs and PCs run fundamentally different operating systems. Sure, you can exchange files between them, just as you can with any other user on the Internet, but if you want to share data, it’s a different game. And by share, I mean keep one file open simultaneously to both Mac and Windows users – a basic requirement of collaborative working.

Unless all the rules are obeyed, this is the easiest way to lose data. In addition, there are many subtle differences in the way file names, colours, fonts and other sorts of data are stored on each platform. If you don’t understand these differences, sooner or later you will get a problem you cannot solve.

Supporting customer choice
Aside from all that, there are unquestionably applications that are better done with Mac OS X, and some with Windows. There is nothing more off-putting to a customer than being forced to choose one particular platform, no matter what the job. And telling a customer you can only support one platform is tantamount to the same thing.

Last but by no means least, when you are pitching to a site with a mixture of Macs and PCs on its network, the minority OS users will always feel downtrodden. Get them on your side and you will raise your chances of getting the business – and out of all proportion to their numbers.

So forget Apple’s market share, what it was or what it will become. If you ignore it, you will be doing so at your cost. I could also say the same about Unix too, but that’s another story.

John Yardley is managing director at reseller JPY