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Dvorak has done it again! I believe it’s time the guy took a long vacation. How else can you describe an article like this?

A cloud is rising over Mac OS X and its future unless Apple makes its boldest move ever: turning OS X into an open-source project. That would make the battle between OS X and Linux the most interesting one on the computer scene. With all attention turned in that direction, there would be nothing Microsoft could do to stem a reversal of its fortunes

First of all, there is no cloud over the future of OS X. It is going strongly into its 5th incarnation, and things couldn’t be looking brighter for Apple. As for the battle between OS X and Linux, there’s nothing to it. Linux just hasn’t matured enough over the years to challenge either Microsoft or Apple with it’s OS. No matter what die hard Linux aficionados tell, it just isn’t ready for primetime. Also, if Apple were to, let’s say, concentrate its resources on competing against Linux, how would Microsoft be hurt?

Step 3: Blowback analysis. Apple needs to analyze the reaction to Windows on a Mac. This includes seeing whether there is massive rejection of the idea—protests, picketing, egg-throwing, and flaming. In other words, can the community at large live with the idea of Windows running on a Mac? That cannot be known or assumed without this test.

This had already been proven before BootCamp was released, thanks in large part to the OnMac community, which made a couple of hackers quite a sum of money. The soul purpose of BootCamp was to show people that if they were on the market for a new computer, an iMac or a MacBook Pro was the way to go.

So this testing scheme essentially breaks down to practicality, functionality, and political marketability. So far, everything seems to be going well except for the blowback, which seems to be mixed but mostly positive. Much of the positive reaction, though, seems to stem from the mistaken supposition that having Windows on a Mac will make OS X look better by comparison, so people will flock to OS X. This is a dubious and dangerous conclusion for Mac heads to draw.

Mixed reactions? Of course, people were shocked at first when BootCamp was actually released, but after that, it has got nothing but good reviews all round.
Again, Apple *is not* releasing BootCamp to compare between OS X and Windows. As John Gruber said, Apple’s main plan is to sell hardware. Rather than choosing between Windows or OS X, Apple is gonna let users choose between either Windows or OS X and Windows.
And as a Mac head who has several Windows using friends regularly drooling over my machine, I can safely say, without any “danger”, that OS X looks better than Windows, XP or Vista.

If the Windows test keeps going the way it’s going, the results may indicate that Mac users are more likely to shift to Windows than we used to think. But what will happen to Mac OS X? I suspect that the testing of Windows on a Mac might be duplicated in reverse, with a similar test of the Mac OS X running on a conventional PC. Here again, we’d need to look at the test-marketing results. In this scenario, the idea would again be to determine—by testing—whether or not getting OS X onto PCs would help or hurt Apple as a company. The same three factors would be assessed: practicality (is anyone interested?), functionality (does it work at all?), and political marketability. In the case of political marketability, one additional variable enters the picture: Microsoft perceiving this as a threat to its business.

“the results may indicate” — what results? Are there any conclusive results that can state that OS X users are switching to XP? In fact, I’ll go ahead and say that more and more XP users are switching base to OS X.
Again, we come to OS X being sold as a software by itself. Again, it has been discussed elsewhere that Apple is first and foremost a hardware company. The profit they make from selling computers can never be replicated by selling software alone. And, Apple will not go down that path in the near future for sure. Hence, the other points are completely invalid.

Since no company, including massive IBM, has been able to compete with or unseat Microsoft from the desktop, Microsoft’s stance alone may prevent any universal acceptance of OS X on the desktop from ever happening. In fact, I assume that as this is being written, Microsoft has coders in its skunk works tearing into OS X looking for deep flaws that it can exploit and publicize. Don’t think otherwise. It only makes sense that they’d do this.

In my belief, Apple never really wants to have universal acceptance. That will not be in keeping with Apple’s bold Think Different strategy. Apple is content with the real power users. People who love their computers, and therefore buy Apple products.
Also, Microsoft and Apple have never been “enemies”. They have always worked together on several products and issues, licensing and all that, and to think that Microsoft has coders tearing apart OS X is just as ridiculous as thinking that John Dvorak writes brilliant and factual articles!

So, whatever Mr. Dvorak says, Apple will not become 100% Open Source, neither will they stop OS X. What we will see is a growth in the number of iMac, MacBook Pro, Mac mini and other Apple Intel chip-ped products, as people will use the dual boot to their full potential, working on their Macs, and gaming on their Windows partitions.
This leaves me to wonder, what’ll happen to Linux?

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 20th, 2006 at 2:50 am and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.