It's weird how schizo these mega-huge companies can act, isn't it? They're so sprawling and heterogeneous following multiple corporate buyouts and reorgs that different departments act like different companies, and sometimes there even are whole different companies simply operating under the same corporate parent-company brand. Case in point: yesterday we pointed out how AT&T Wireless took a potentially interesting concept-- a downloadable music store for mobile phones-- and implemented it as something lamer than an octopus with eight bad ankles and nine bad knees: while you can indeed use supported cell phones to browse and buy songs, you still have to go back to your Wintel PC to download and play them after you've bought them. And even once you do that, you can't install the songs on your phone and take your music with you. Duh.

So how is it that AT&T Wireless could come up with such a ludicrous "competitor" to the iTunes Music Store, and yet AT&T as a whole could do something as fundamentally cool as considering ditching Windows completely and replacing each and every one of "tens of thousands" of desktop PCs in the entire corporation with Macs running Mac OS X? Faithful viewer N Gray tipped us off to a CNET article reporting that the company's info czar has tasked a team of researchers to "assess the appropriateness of desktop operating systems for the company" by "testing how Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X stack up on security, reliability, and total cost of ownership." This is a curious move, because IT types are notorious for avoiding total cost of ownership figures like the plague, since one of the ways that Macs wind up with lower TCO numbers than Wintels is because they require less IT manpower to maintain. It's a self-preservation thing; kinda slimy, really, but can you blame them?

Anyway, for whatever reason, the IT top dog at AT&T is testing the waters. But don't get your hopes up too high, since an AT&T spokesperson is clear that "most likely, AT&T will stick with Windows, because Microsoft is addressing many of [the] problems associated with its desktop software, including security flaws." And if the company did choose to ditch Windows, we'd think that initial costs would, as usual, outweigh TCO and Linux would win out because the OS itself is free and it would run on AT&T's existing "tens of thousands" of computers. The Mac is clearly the Nader in this race. Still, the very notion that Mac OS X is even on the ballot speaks volumes about the Mac platform's increasing street cred among corporate enterprise types these days. It'll probably be a good long while before giganto-huge corporations seriously consider buying fleets of Macs, but half a decade ago the idea that it could ever happen at all was two steps beyond laughable, so with some hard work, Apple may win one of these big enterprise contracts yet.

By the way, even if you are enough of a grinning optimist to think that AT&T will see the light and blow $10 million or more to replace all of its Wintels with Macs, the company doesn't expect to make its decision until "the end of next year or early 2006." Ah, business at the speed of treacle. Come to think of it, maybe that's why AT&T's CIO is "evaluating options" even though Windows is apparently the foregone conclusion: he gets to keep buying "test machines" on the company dime that will never be used as actual corporate desktops. We can hear the CIO now: "Is the 17-inch PowerBook in yet? Because I need to 'test' it for a year or so. How about the 20-inch iMac G5? My daughter's going to 'test' that one at home." Pretty sneaky, sis.