Yeah, the materialism is really bad. There is this whole "Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD) phenomenon that certain people are pushing for. Those people? Apple zealots who want to bring their MacBook Pro or iPad or iPhone into the workplace because they turn their noses up at Windows and BlackBerry. These people have no idea how poorly those devices integrate into current enterprise environments and how much trouble they make. Then, when IT can't solve an issue on their device it's all IT's fault. It's ridiculous.
That said, it is creating a push for platform-agnostic software and software tools. For instance Citrix is experiencing a revitalization because Citrix makes it (relatively) simple to provide an easily supportable application and make it available on any platform that has a Citrix client available. Then you still get things like Active Directory authentication for the app, data centralization in the data center rather than on an uncontrolled (or uncontrollable) device, and a familiar support ecosystem.
But still, it is fucking ridiculous that people have the gall to say "I am going to use what I want to do my job, and you have to just deal with it. It's called adapting." These people have no concern for things like data security or using economies of scale to bring down costs. And the problem is that sometimes these people are the executives of the company. They'll demand that IT support their MacBook Pros and then turn around and bitch when IT costs start growing out of control, even though IT had to send people to Mac OS X training, purchase expensive software like ExtremeZ-IP to support the Apple File Protocol (since SMB support on Macs is a moving target and frequently creates interoperability issues), etc.
My last employer was a publishing company. Now, it used to be true that Macs were better for content creation than Windows PCs, but that is just a myth now. That said, many content creators learned everything they know on Macs and think they are the best tool for the job, whether it is true or not. So we gave in to that and all the designers had Macs. Like 60% of the company. But then they would hire editors, who do the copy editing in Microsoft Word, and the hiring manager would request a Mac. We would say no, Macs are almost double the cost and the Microsoft programs are both less reliable and less feature rich than the Windows-based equivalent. Yet they would say that it was part of the demand of the editor as part of the offer acceptance. And if we tried to fight it, it would go up to the CEO at some point - a self-labeled Apple-lover - who would basically make us comply with the request. We had managers that used Microsoft Excel more than anything (which suuuuuucked on Macs as of version 2008), and when we told them all their Excel problems would go away if they would just get a Windows laptop, they would refuse yet out of the other side of their mouth complain about Excel for Mac and how it doesn't have the features or reliability they needed.
All in the name of Apple love. Its asinine.
