You’ve probably read before stories about how a company refuses to let their employees use their competitor’s products but in Google, staffs are encouraged to use Apple Macs instead of Windows devices or even the company’s very own Chromebooks. In a talk at the LISA ’13 conference earlier this month, Google explained how the company is using over 43,000 units of Macs and have been doing so without much help from Apple at all.
“There was a time when Macs were a small part of the Google fleet. But as of now if you start at Google and want to use a platform other than Mac you have to make a business case.” – Clay Caviness, a Google System Engineer.
Despite having so many Macs, Google does not rely entire on Apple in terms of software. “We don’t use any Apple’s tools to manage the Macs”, he said in the conference. Instead, Google uses its self-developed programs or even third-party ones to manage their vast amount of Macs. Google updated its Macs from OS X 10.7 to 10.8 for 99.5% of its entire collection in 8 weeks, and plans to do the same for the latest OS X 10.9 Mavericks update.
But Google’s preference for Mac is not a secret. In the recent post by Eric Schmidt, the Chairman of Google, teaching users how to switch from the iPhone to an Android, he actually mentioned “Like the people who moved from PCs to Macs and never switched back, you will switch from iPhone to Android and never switch back”.
(Source: BGR)
