Surely you do realize that the the constant use of computers in a work place is not reserved for IT professionals alone.

It may be true that some piece of software is programmed for exclusive and specific OS use that is critical for the day to day operation and locks you to a vendor or OS. But it is usually not developed in house, nor does the organization can (or even should, if its not its competency or mission) develop an alternative software to supplant it. Developing complex software costs allot of money, not every organization can do this.

Put simply, Jackass.Corp makes niche software that runs only on windows, or only on OSX (finalcut pro comes to mind for instance) but there is often no alternative at all or a very poor substitute virtually unknown to current and potential staff. What would be a pragmatic choice?

In Addition and to its credit. Technologies like Active directory /group policy are far more mature and fine grained then what is currently offered by Apple (including custom rsync solutions) this has just been a focus of the work Microsoft did in the last 10 years. This is no small issue as it saves allot of time, and lower costs for the support team operations.

To some extent Apple has recognized this themselves, and have abandoned the server platform, it was increasingly a ridiculous proposition to maintain OSX servers (not to mention costly) when every other server platform we had became virtualized and hardware independent (again talking about a JackAss.corp that just ignored the changes of the time)

Where i would agree with you is that the most viable alternative going forward is to implement new applications that are browser based, then it wouldn't matter what OS it runs on that much, so it will be either thin clients, or whoever offers the cheapest license. and in my case, again, Microsoft offered far cheaper licensing price per machine. Personally my measure point is Firefox compatibility and Chrome. Not IE and for that matter not safari either. but we are long way away from having enterprise business that runs entirely through a browser windows.

Banning software or hardware use based on mere preference is wrongheaded, in my case we don't ban any cellular technology, but discourage blackberries (because of their infuriating reliance on the BIS server hosted in house or at your cell provider, and tends to break whenever you patch your mail server system). there is a contingent of blackberry users religiously devoted to their devices, we explain that the efforts on our behalf to maintain their preference prevents us from doing other things, hopefully in time, this will sink in, either that, or the cost to our time will become too much, We would rather study how to support and deal with IOS and android bugs then keep polished skills on increasingly irrelevant platform (in our context that is).

Outside of myopic world of Tech, most people will not leave a position due to the choice of OS, this type zealotry is usually reserved for geeks that do computing for a living not as a mean for some other goal (say organize a massive street festival).

something that is easy to forget, is that outside of just mere preference, there is an issue of competency, a user may prefer a certain system, but he/she isn't always competent enough to fix a problem when it surfaces (and why should she, fixing a problem after all... isn't her job or interest). There is also the user who has a preference to an antiquated, even obsolete piece of software, moving them away from a system they feel competent in to something newer is often painful, this, by the way, is not exclusive to any OS.

By the way, as a sidenote, in an attempt to avoid changing OS for staff if they didnt want but still maintain access to software they had to, but couldn't use, we tried virtual desktops, (ala parallels, vmware etc) It was a disaster, your average user just couldn't deal with it, frequent crashes, slowdowns and panic cries to the helpdesk. After we moved away from this scenario we ware able to save a staggering amount of our operation costs and funnel it towards development (which we did not have before).

perhaps all this software is boring for the startup mindset to develop, its a pity cause there is a gaping need for innovation in this arena that is left virtually unattended to, and its not just because of some IT manager reticence (IT managers often like the newest gadgets and OS too) Its because it is not created, people are hell bent on building the next spacefacetwatcloud that generates revenue from a new advertisement selling paradigm instead of moving the bigger org into a new age.

I hope this long winded reply, explains a little.