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A group of five enterprise software companies on Monday announced the creation of the Enterprise Desktop Alliance to facilitate the acceptance of Macintosh computers in organizational environments managed with Microsoft Windows. The alliance -- created by Atempo, Centrify, Group Logic, LANrev and Parallels -- will validate and promote the availability of solutions that make it easier to deploy, integrate and manage Macs in the enterprise using Microsoft Windows-based solutions.

The demand for content on the Internet has reached an all-time high, and it's only getting higher. People can't get enough of what's being referred to as "Web 2.0": digital media, streaming videos, blogs and social networking. Even since the Web's earliest, clunkiest days, it's always been a challenge for Web developers to keep on top of the rapid developments and changes that occur every minute of every day in the world of technology. One company answering the call of webmasters and developers across the world is that innovator of innovation: Apple.

Hindsight, as they say, is always 20/20. Less than five months after going public with plans to immediately start replacing its Windows-based PCs with Macs, Auto Warehousing was forced to push back the project by more than a month. That was last December. The reason was not a lack of money, manpower or executive support. Rather, what stymied the project were protests from workers and objections from customers who perceived the technology switch as unnecessarily costly. "I didn't see this coming at all," says Dale Frantz, CIO of the Tacoma, Wash.-based company.

Guido Sacchi, CIO and senior vice president of corporate strategies at CompuCredit, decided to go with the flow. He's allowing Macintoshes into the business when the requester makes a valid business case. "If they think they can get better productivity on a Mac, so be it. Who am I to stop them?" he says. Sacchi's attitude is a tacit acknowledgment that innovative technologies and those offering "superior user experience" are evolving in the home market, not the business arena.

A while back, I read a heated discussion about Apple's supposed moral obligation to the enterprise. The context was that Apple should endeavor to make products that are both fun to use, compelling and check all the enterprise boxes. The failure to fully penetrate the enterprise was presented as a deficiency of Apple's. I am going to tell you that the problem is not with Apple, but rather it is a cultural problem that needs to be solved by the Apple community and Apple enthusiasts in the workforce.

As a senior technical support analyst at Harcourt, Randy Rowles is happy that he gets to manage the educational publisher's 1,000 or so Macintosh systems. He's perhaps even a little smug about how their stability and ease of use helps simplify his job. With Harcourt's Mac support team needing fewer administrators relative to the number of installed systems than the Windows group does, "our TCO from a support standpoint has always been lower," Rowles said, referring to total cost of ownership.

Apple has delivered a major upgrade to Xsan, the company's enterprise-class storage area network file system for Mac OS X. Called "Xsan 2," the upgrade includes completely redesigned administration tools, which Apple said make it even easier for first-time users to set up and deploy a SAN. In addition, Apple has introduced new features, including MultiSAN, which lets users on a single workstation access multiple SANs at the same time. Xsan 2 is also fully integrated with Mac OS X Leopard and Mac OS X Leopard Server.

Apple's seemingly benign approach to the enterprise market belies the strides it is making in terms of its technology becoming a more viable alternative in the enterprise market. In contrast to the media-intensive promotional campaigns it uses for its consumer products -- the iPod, iPhone, Mac and iMac PCs -- Apple is steadily, though rather quietly, building up the Unix capabilities and Windows compatibility of its Mac OS X operating system, as well as the cost/performance ratios of its Xserve servers and Xserve RAID and Xsan storage technology.

In late October, a buddy from my MacWeek days e-mailed me with this half-joking dig: "Apple's worth more than IBM. The Mac wins!!" My friend wasn't alone in his glee. Bloggers and Web sites devoted to all things Macintosh were quick to put a verbal boot to IBM's keister when Apple's market capitalization surpassed IBM's. At one point this month, the stock market pegged the maker of the ultratrendy iPod and iPhone at a higher valuation -- $12 billion more -- than IBM, which makes boring old mainframes.