
UVa First-Year Student Computer Inventory: 1997-2008 Comparison - MaysonL
http://itc.virginia.edu/students/inventory/compare/
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kailoa
That last graph is one of those "holy shit" types of revelations. MS should be
scared spitless.

~~~
edw519
"MS should be scared spitless."

From 1997-2009, I called on about 100 customer sites.

From this small, but faily representative, sample, the percentage of corporate
desktops does not appear to have changed much:

1997: Windows 99% Mac 1%

2009 Windows 99% Mac 1%

The only people using Macs are designers, engineers, and a few programmers.
They insist on them for their specialties. Everyone else gets a PC with
Windows.

In the corporate world, MS doesn't have anything to worry about (yet).

~~~
pg
Except trends flow from present undergrads to companies, not the other way
around.

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edw519
Hence the "(yet)".

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ivankirigin
A problem that is obvious and growing should be "worried about" immediately.
If you wait till the problem is gone and you've lost, it's too late.

At my last job (at a company of 500), I used MS for office tools, OSes, and
server side services like mail.

At my startup, as the "IT" guy, I live on google for free and Apple for cheap.
I curse under my breath when I get a Word Doc or PowerPoint instead of a PDF.
My company can scale to 500 on these practices, which means Microsoft has a
great deal to worry about. Right now.

[edit: correction, I use Windows on a cheap PC to periodically test how broken
IE is. Soon that will be a convenient web service]

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nop
I'm surprised by the operating systems graph, I didn't think Mac OS would have
gone up that much and I especially thought "Other" would be much higher or at
least increasing by any amount.

I wonder how that relates to what type of school University of Virginia is as
I know nothing about it. It would be interesting to see how that compares to
Stanford, MIT and the like.

~~~
schleyfox
As a student who is in that dataset, I think it makes sense. Basically, UVa is
a pretty preppy school and Macs are really trendy right now. From my friends
and what I see on grounds, I'm surprised that the Mac ownership is not
numerically higher. We also focus on the liberal arts, which helps Mac. Linux
is a real pain to get to work on the network. The decline in "other" is
probably in a large part the result of Mac OS providing a very decent
Unix/programming environment. I do see CS professors pretty split between Mac
and Linux.

I'd imagine that schools that are more engineering focused schools would
probably use more Linux, but I would not be surprised if Mac has converted a
lot of them as well.

For the record, I had three computers windows, linux, and mac for most of last
year, and I was one of the 8 "others" on that chart.

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scott_s
I think you're remiss in not mentioning that UVA has very strong science and
engineering programs.

(This is a bit surreal, as I did my undergrad at Virginia Tech, my Master's at
W&M, and now my PhD back at Tech. I've never cared for the rivalries, but I
didn't think I'd ever feel compelled to defend UVA to one of its own
students.)

~~~
gamerates
The business school isn't too shabby either
<http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday/newsRelease.php?id=7870>

:)

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las3rjock
Am I the only person who looks at the first table and wonders who was the lone
first-year student in 2008 who didn't own a computer?

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zimbabwe
The college I'm attending makes owning a Macbook Pro mandatory. I wonder how
many colleges actively deny use of a Mac, especially considering Boot Camp.

