Windows stays prominent because Microsoft caters to corporations which abuse the poor, defenseless OS into doing things like locking users out of changing the desktop background and the sleep timeout. Until Apple offers power-hungry corporate IT middle managers the same level of user-hostile malfeasance in the name of “security,” Microsoft will hold the high ground in corporate deployments.
This becomes a self-perpetuating cycle of not-so-micro-aggressions, as the corporate use of Windows continues to skew all the Microsoft-bought-and-paid-for industry polls that show how much more prevalent Windows is over OSX, and self-justify corporate America that they’re doing the right thing by continuing to stick with it. This, in turn, leads to an entire sub-industry of corporate “security” software which must be installed on Windows, because, well, the bought-and-paid-for auditors told them they had to.
Thus, I wind up with a corporate laptop with 3 different “endpoint” security products installed on it, and something like 30-40 different scripts and checks that run almost by the hour to make sure that the inherent weaknesses of Windows hasn’t compromised our precious meeting PPT’s, which #CorporateIT apparently considers as sensitive as the US nuclear arsenal codes.
Apple offers an alternative to this madness, and I’m very glad they do. In my experience, almost no one runs Windows personally, except for gaming purposes. Numbers like StatCounter vastly over-report Windows usage, because everyone working for a large corporation and in the government is forced to use Windows.
I wish someone would produce a market share report that 1) separates corporate purchases and 2) includes phones as primary computing devices. I think we would see that the “computing world” is vastly different than Gartner would have us believe.