ANTenna Blog -- Apple

According to a survey touted by Windows-on-Mac vendor Parallels, 36% of undergraduates plan to purchase a Mac, and many of them plan to run Windows software on it. SMBs might want to consider planning to accommodate such flexible platform choices in making their IT decisions -- after all, these students will be in the workforce within five years.

It's curious how themes sometimes emerge in the news. For example, just the other day I was writing about how enterprise CIOs and IT managers were constrained to stay with Windows by the software they ran or just by general inertia. But one IT manager I quoted said, "As new and younger personnel enter our organization, and as an increasing number of applications are running in the browser, the OS is is becoming less relevant. Thus, we are being more open to the requests of our user community."

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Here it is just a couple of days later, and there's news of a survey that shows more than a third of undergraduates plan to purchase Macs. And according to Parallels, maker of software that enables Mac users to run Windows programs, a "significant number of student Mac users still want to be able to run Windows or PC-based applications." That finding is awfully convenient for Parallels, but it points to the essential truth of that IT manager's statement. Employees are likely going to resent more and more being forced to work on an unfamiliar or disliked platform. Fortunately, SMBs are nimbler than those hamstrung enterprises and can adapt more quickly to the new multiplatform or platform-agnostic world. Businesses that start to adapt and prepare now will have a leg up on hiring the best prospects when those undergraduates' resumes start to arrive in their inboxes.

You might be able to get a jump on understanding the reasoning of students who choose to run Windows software on a Mac from the Mac to School blog, sponsored by Parallels. The blog's tagline reads, "Thousands of college students all over the world are running Windows-based software on their Macs right now!" The blog's main author, sophomore Tim Deal, writes that "It's all about learning and sharing the college experience with fellow Mac users."