Considering that my shiny new Highwinds-sponsored MacBook Pro arrived in the mail this afternoon, this was a nice item to see on the RSS feed today: the slow bleed of corporate users switching over to Macs has sped up to a trickle with the recent IBM pilot program for Macs.

Reasons cited include the following. I have bolded the interesting items to note.

- Alternative to Microsoft Windows
- Less prone to security issues
- Widely used in the academic world with which Research has close ties
- Many new hires are more comfortable with the Mac and lately asking for it
- Growing Mac community in Research and within IBM that finds the development environment on Mac more convenient
- Growing acceptance of the Mac as a consumer and business oriented client platform
- WPLC strategy includes significant investments in achieving the Mac platform parity

Of all the items, I am most interested in the one about "Many new hires are more comfortable with the Mac and lately asking for it". The iPod halo effect got people on to the Mac at their homes, and now the Mac at home halo effect is getting people using Macs at work. When big companies like IBM start supporting their software on the Mac, there are going to be even fewer reasons for corporate environments not to make the transition.

Frankly, with all the technology options today I think it's simply stupid to build an app for a single platform; it's so easy to build cross-platform apps these days. If Microsoft delivered Visual Studio on the Mac I probably would have learned .NET and C# years back.

Personally, I'd love to see Rational Software Modeler running on the Mac natively. Let's see if IBM stays the course.