Today, Apple faithful are gathering in San Francisco for the last Macworld Conference. Unfortunately, Steve Jobs will not be keynoting this year. It seems that the master of wow in a black turtleneck is not feeling well. I wish him speedy recovery and I will certainly miss his keynote.
Apple is on a roll with its iPod and iPhone product lines. It seems every man, woman and child has one of those. But its new found success is not all about music and phones. Apple is kicking some serious PC butt. Those “I am a Mac and I am a PC” ads must be working. Net Applications released market share stats for December 2008 and Mac OS X now commands almost 10% share. This is up from about 6% only 2 years ago.
So, while Macworld attendees will be hearing about the new cool products coming from the from 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino we at IBM have done what would have been unthinkable only a few years ago and delivered a major product for the Mac OS X. Over the holidays we released DB2 for the Mac. It is a beta so there are some rough edges here and there. But, it is available for download now. It is a 64-bit version and it runs on Intel-based Macs. We like to think that it is a great justification for your boss (or significant other) to approve a purchase of a brand new MacBook Pro.
The new battery in MacBook Pro 17
And if “DB2 runs on it” is not quite enough of a justification, tell your boss that it is a free DB2 i.e DB2 Express-C with all the great features like pureXML that till now were simply not available on the Mac.
The gains that Macs have made are a tremendous achievement no doubt. However, despite its popularity in the consumer space, Mac is not exactly taking the corporate world by storm quite yet; though it may very well do so in good time. It seems that while Macs are loved by the programmer types, specifically scripting language developers (PHP, Python Ruby on Rails etc.) the IT folks are not yet deploying racks of Apple Xserves. When it comes to servers, Apple gear is still placed in the “Other” category when it comes to market share. This Mac popularity with professional programmers is really the driving force behind DB2 for the Mac OS X. We have build this product specifically to appeal to developers that use Mac as their development platform of choice. The applications that you build using DB2 on the Mac can be deployed to DB2 running on Apple servers but also on Linux, Windows, and Unix servers. They can even be deployed on the IBM mainframes and IBM System i mid-range servers. So, you can use a Mac laptop to build and deploy on to a system that is approved by your enterprise IT. How cool is that! Oh, and did I mention that it is free 😉
WOW … Great …. Number one item on my list when I get home tonight…
Thank you IBM … You are the greatest!
It is also exciting to see more Lotus products being announced on Mac OS X also.
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2009/01/06/ibm-apple-software-tech-enter-cx_ag_0106ibmapple.html
Have fun at the show Leon..
Cool Thanks for this blog. I am new at python and this will help a lot.