Jumping from a news site to another, I got to an article published by ZDNet Australia's Munir Kotandia on the 8th of December about a report published last week by the research group Gartner. I was really amazed to find out that this report concluded that, for enterprise users, OS X "sounds better" than Linux as a desktop operating system, and instead of reducing the amount of Windows users in this environment, new Macs are slowly throwing out Linux-based desktops from the business world.

The name of the report, "Enterprise Mac Clients Remain Limited, but Apple's Appeal is Growsing", points out one of the problems that limit Apple's growth in the business sector. For system administrators this doesn't sound like good news, because they will have to prepare themselves for more and more Mac systems to take care of, although OS X is not considered to be "a suitable enterprise wide platform".

The surprising part of this whole deal is that Macs are replacing Unix and Linux workstations in many cases, rather than Windows PCs, and Microsoft doesn't have to fear Apple yet, because 70 percent of the enterprise applications require one of their Windows operating systems at this time.

"We don't expect the typical organisation to even reach the point where half of its applications are OS-agnostic until 2011", said the report, so there's enough time for everybody to get used to the changes. The interesting part in Gartner's report is that they said the graphics and media production employees using Macs are so loyal to their platform, that in case of a corporate migration to Windows, they would seek work elsewhere instead of moving under the Microsoft banner.

At last, Apple's mistakes are considered to be the lack of Mac OS X licensing to third party manufacturers, the unclear roadmaps for supporting current versions of the operating system and the software applications that come with every Mac that "could raise legal issues and reduce worker productivity", according to ZDNet.