I may have to buy my youngest a Mac.

http://venturebeat.com/2008/04/16/ib...ke-them-a-lot/

IBM having employees test out Macs at work, and they like them — a lot
MG Siegler | April 16th, 2008 | 18 Comments
When both Microsoft and Apple were just young up-and-comers in the
industry, one company stood above all others: IBM. The behemoth, which
had dominated the tech landscape since the 1930s, was eventually
overshadowed by the two in the operating system and then Internet age,
and exited the PC business in 2005. Now they are just another big tech
company reliant on Microsoft Windows — but that could soon change.

IBM’s Research division has launched a pilot program aimed at moving its
workers away from Windows, according to an internal document
RoughlyDrafted has obtained. The big benefactor here? Apple, a company
which has been doing very well with the personal computer crowd but
hasn’t yet been able to significantly penetrate large corporate
environments.

Interestingly enough, IBM’s program goes so far as to give employees
Apple MacBook Pro laptops instead of their traditional ThinkPads — a
brand IBM developed but sold to Levono in 2005. Its stated reasons for
doing so:

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
The limited first phase of the program ran from Ocotober 2007 until
January 2008. When asked about the experience, 18 of the 22 participants
who responded said the Mac offered a better experience than their PC.
One rated it the same, and only three thought it was worse. These test
subjects included research scientists, software engineers and a couple
higher-level employees. Seven of them had little or no Mac experience
prior to the test.

Not surprisingly, all of those who responded positively to the Mac
experience, asked to keep the MacBook Pro rather than return to a ThinkPad.

IBM plans to expand this program in 2008 and the company has even
launched an internal Mac@IBM website. Linux is another Non-Windows OS it
is interested in promoting, but was not a part of this study.

If one of the largest corporations in the world is experimenting with
using Apple computers, and its employees are preferring it at an 86
percent rate, perhaps it’s not too early for Microsoft to start worrying
about their enterprise dominance.

This experiment has all the makings of another “I’m a PC/I’m a Mac”
commercials in the future.