Tuesday, January 14, 2003

Best Spam Subject line mistake ever; "Does your job pay you up to 00.00 an hour?" Why yes it does, it does pay me up to zero dollars and zero cents an hour. 1:12:36 PM

There's been some Macintosh platform commentary since MacWorld, mostly oriented around Apple trying to become more independent of Microsoft. A lot of people have been musing about the release of Keynote, and also of Safari, and how these point to less reliance for the Apple X platform on Microsoft's Office franchise. The common sense approach yields the idea that, with the addition of a Word replacement and an Excel replacement, Apple would have all of the Office bases covered. Apple would then be able to compete head to head without the fear of reprisal from the Pacific NorthWest. I've been thinking about this, and about some of the other things that Apple has done over the last couple of years, and I've come to the conclusion that it is quite possible that Apple is thinking bigger than most people are suspecting. While hardware remains the single largest contributor to revenue for the fruit flavored company, I suspect that their long term plan is to become a software company that can compete head to head with Microsoft on their own Intel and AMD built turf. I suspect that Apple is slowly making the transition to becoming a Microsoft-esque software vendor. Jim over at have Browser, Will Travel has more comments about this, and the role of Open Source in this whole possibility. (Jim, thanks for collaborating with me on this speculation. Some of the comments here are based on conversations that Jim and I have had since I first made this posting.) So, I continue to think about this. It seems like the first logical step that Apple would want to achieve, assuming that the above is their goal, would be some level of market penetration for Mac OS X. I believe that they have accomplished this goal. With a couple(or one, read Quark) of exceptions, they have managed to get the major third party applications migrated to the new operating system. So let's assume, for the moment, that they have attained some level of critical mass. The next step, then, would be for them to phase out their classic operating system, which is far more platform dependent currently than the new operating system. To that end, their new machines won't boot into the classic Mac operating system at all. If they can completely phase out the classic Mac OS, they get a lot more flexibility in terms of what hardware they can move to in the future. Completely making the move over to Intel will require, without a doubt, the loss of the ability to run the Classic application within Mac OS X as well, which may be worth it in the long run if Apple can provide some sort of compatibility layer on which users can run Windows applications. The Linux community has managed to do a pretty decent job of this themselves, and Apple has shown a willingness to embrace and extend Open Source software, so this idea is not as much of a stretch as it seems. So let's make the assumption that they then decide to move to the Intel/AMD processor families, what would their next step be? Well, there is the persistent rumor that they have a X86 version of Mac OS X internally. I somehow doubt that this would be nearly as up to date and optimized as the current PowerPC release, if it exists at all. One thing we do know publicly is that Darwin, the underpinning of the entire OS, is available for X86. So there would be some investement that they would need to make internally before they could even go public with an x86 version. After that, they would have to guide the developer community through yet another transition. They should be getting better at this after the last ten years of various migrations, especially considering how painful some of them have seemed to the observer. This move could have huge payoffs in terms of the viability of the platform. It seems that most of the educated objections in the Mac OS X vs. Windows XP debate concede that Mac OS X is the better OS, and with some refinement, it will be even better. The hardware platform performance issue, however, is rapidly catching up with them, and I don't see any real way out except a move to the same platform that the other operating system(s) run on. Having said the above, I don't mean to trivialize the amount of third party work that this would require. According to Jim, as long as developers haven't put in assembly, or used altivec functions, carbon, cocoa and bsd code should just be a recompile. So a large percentage of developers would just have to do a small amount of work and testing to get over the hump, which rhymes nicely with bump. The small percentage that would require more work, however, are made up of some very important developers including people like Adobe. I wonder how willing to do something like this companies will be so soon after making an investment in moving to Mac OS X from the classic Mac OS. I'm guessing that if it means selling more copies of their software, some or all of these companies should be willing to do it. The other flaws in this plan are somewhat obvious ones. Assuming that Apple made the transition to being a software only developer, the resources needed in terms of supporting the large variety of PC hardware available would be greater. I think that they could get over and around this obstacle a number of ways including only certifying certain machines from certain vendors, or continuing with their practice of requiring an Apple ROM in machines. Certainly, they are in better shape to do this now than they have ever been in the history of the company. Most of the hardware they use now is industry standard, no more NuBus, no more Apple Serial, no more ADB. They would have to charge substantially more than they do currently for the Operating System, or their financial viability would be questionable. On the other hand, they could choose to remain the sole hardware vendor. I think this would be a mistake, and would negate some of the benefits this transition, but they could still do it. Of all this speculation, the most fun part is thinking about what the possible effects of such a transition on the industry could be. In my opinion, this whole thing would be great for the industry. It would give MSFT much needed real competition. I think back to the nineties, when Microsoft purposely crippled their Professional Workstation operating system so that it could not be effectively used for things like Web serving, and I want to see another professional quality commercial operating system with commercial application support on the same platform. 9:34:51 AM

Apple objects. Yawn. 9:19:52 AM