Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

The economy may be in a nosedive, but some elements of it are clearly doing well. Apple Computer is one such piece of the economic puzzle, and it is riding high after reporting much better that expected earnings for its most recent reporting period. Even more positive is the basis for those higher earnings. It was not iPods or iPhones that did it, although sales of those items are going well. Rather, the lynchpin of this positive revenue report was the sales of Macs.

I believe that I can identify several of the major reasons for these upbeat Mac sales. As reported in this column (and many others), the Mac is becoming more and more welcome in the eyes of corporate IT personnel. This may be because it is a solid performer, via OS X, and comes with less IT-related problems than does Microsoft Vista. Of course, Vista itself is yet another prime reason for improved Mac sales. Nor does it hurt that a Mac computer is built completely  out of PC parts these days.

If you can have a computer that is built out of standard PC parts, runs a solid operating system, performs well as a whole, and will even run that wretched Windows operating system as one of its functions, how can you go wrong with an Apple? Even the price differential is not what you might think it is. It is not at all difficult to configure a PC from Dell, Acer, HP, or Gateway to look like Mac specs and find out that the non-Apple computer is the expensive one. In fact, the only hard part is matching Mac specs on a PC in the first place.

I have been a PC user since the original IBM PC and a Windows user since it first appeared, lo these many years ago. Regardless of personal history, I am on the brink of buying a MacBook Pro because I can no long defend the way that Microsoft does business, or the abysmal state of Microsoft software. I am a huge fan of Open Source everything, but I do not feel that any one Linux distro is quite steady enough yet for us all to bet the farm on. So I will go with Apple as the lesser of two evils, the greater being Microsoft.

I will get OS X, perhaps the best OS on the market today. I will get both PC hardware and Windows compatibility. On the way to making that change, I can register my vote against Windows with my feet and my checkbook. In a couple of more years, I hope to be able to vote that way again on my way to a total Linux computing environment. And I would sure like to spend those years in a Microsoft-free zone.