Apple should offer Macs with OS X and Windows for businesses

The internet is absolutely abuzz on fire over the ramifications of Boot Camp, and this time around the wild speculation isn't confined just to the crazed, Mountain-Dew-infused digg posts. Everyone is hypothesizing that Boot Camp signifies things like the death of Mac gaming, software support for OS X or even that Dvorak (the shock-journalist that he is) was right after all.

There are quite a few articles out there, however, about the appeal that these Intel Macs and Boot Camp have to education and IT departments of companies both big and small. A lot of headlines like "Companies now have one more reason to look at the Mac" are piling into endo at an alarming rate, and I started thinking about something C.K. said when Boot Camp landed: "However, over time, if Apple plays it's cards right and doesn't screw things up, people will see that booting into OS X runs more smoothly and is nicer than booting into Windows, and we may see more switchers than ever before."

While that's probably very true on the consumer side of things, I'm willing to bet that, even if businesses want to gobble up a batch of Macs overnight, the software they need their company to run isn't going to magically start working on OS X in the blink of an IT manager's eye. Honestly, I never thought I would say this, but case in point: if Apple started offering Macs with OS X and Windows pre-installed to the business sector, they could rake in companies looking to switch by the truck load. This option would be the nail in the coffin for business customers who want an out-of-the-box solution for getting set up on Macs with a minimum of fuss. In fact, there would be any fuss. These customers would have the best of both worlds from the moment they hit the power button, and Apple would have a rock solid strategy for putting business hardware competitors like Dell on the run.

Apple doesn't need to license Mac OS X to PC manufacturers. With all the doors that Boot Camp opens for the company, Apple simply need to warn them to get out of the way.