Thoughts on Apple Mac OS X Leopard

The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg has published his review of Leopard: Leopard: Faster, Easier Than Vista.  I haven't gotten a copy yet, my iMac G5's hard drive is almost full and I'm not able to free up the 10 GB of space needed to install until I can move some stuff around.

But with all the attention on Mac, including Apple's huge sales growth (3Q sales up 34% over a year ago), a lackluster response to Vista, I wonder if it means we're on the cusp of an inflection point in the PC market.  Increasingly I'm hearing from enterprise folks a growing interest in moving from Windows desktops that cost a fortune to support to either an application infrastructure based on some combination of virtualized apps, web-based apps, and thin-client desktops based on Linux, or Mac.  It used to be rare to see a Mac in public, now the are everywhere.  A recent poll of college students by SurveyU noted that 44% of college students planned to buy a Mac for their next computer purchase (with 23% currently using Mac)

I don't have any hard data on Macs in the enterprise, but at the recent Cisco analyst's event in Toronto about a quarter of Cisco folks had Macs.  I also recently spoke to a friend at a large service provider who told me that the entire engineering group was in the process of moving to Mac.  I've heard that Macs are prevalent at places like Google as well.  It's rare that I come across anyone in the tech industry who wouldn't rather use a Mac if given the choice.  I wonder as Macs gain a huge percentage of the college market, if we'll see greater demand in the overall enterprise space for Macs instead of Windows machines. (See: "What Apple's Leopard Means To The Enterprie" on PCWorld.com for some other examples of enterprises considering switching to Mac).

But Apple still doesn't have an enterprise strategy, nor do they have a network of resellers/partners who can support Mac environments in the enterprise market.  There are still many business apps that won't run on a Mac (yes, you can run them in emulation using Parallels with a licensed copy of Windows, but that adds a tremendous amount of money to the cost of each desktop).  It seems there is a huge opportunity that's there for the taking (by either Apple or a partner).

Perhaps it will take more efforts by folks like IBM Lotus, who are rapidly achieving parity in Mac and Windows (and Linux) environments to see the enterprise make a shift.  I'm also curious to see how the growth in interest in Macs (and thin clients) impacts Microsoft's OCS strategy, which at this point requires XP or Vista to take advantage of presence and rich-media communications capabilities.