46% of Citrix Employees* Choose Apple
30 Sep 2011
In case you missed this statistic buried in the message that employee choice seems to be Apple’s entry to the enterprise.
46% is a huge number, and presents a great growth opportunity. Of course, the asterisks is there because it’s really 46% of the 1,000 employees on the trial program at Citrix, which might have a different demographic than the broader population.
Sitting here at NWC the other day, I saw a guy working. Went up to him and said “you have a corporate job too, where do you work?”. Someone overheard me and was like “how did you know he had a corporate job?”. Simple. The guy was working on a Dell laptop and had a SecureID next to him. Corporate issue just like IBM’s blue suit was back in the day.
I continue to believe that the common thinking behind PC’s having a lower cost of ownership than Macs is false. When purely looking at the purchase price, just one aspect of the total cost of ownership, they are cheaper, so CFO’s continue to purchase them by the boatload.
I believe that when people who use the machines are paying, even out of their own pocket, they believe Macs have more value. That will translate into Macs invading the enterprise as more BYOD programs launch.
When employees make the decision, they choose otherwise. Even if part of the purchase price comes out of their own pocket1 employees will choose Macs because they are ones that bear the other aspects of using the laptop beyond the cost. For me, weight, battery life, number of times a day it needs to reboot, and how long I can use the machine with performance close to day-one performance are equally important to cost.
Oh, and did I mention fun. Fun is important too… and I have a lot more fun with my Mac than I ever did with a PC.
Time will tell. I remain long AAPL in anticipation.
- assuming these employee-choose programs give a fixed stipend for people to choose their own laptop, but perhaps not one that covers the full cost of a Mac [↩]
