On Wed, 2005-06-08 at 13:23 +0800, Brett Carboni wrote: > > - It sounds like we're up for a(nother) software transition for > > sociological reasons: > > I think it may be more like economic reasons. > > Steve's vision for Apple in the future may be to be an opposition to > WIndows.
Maybe... he has to worry about the fact that Apple *needs* Microsoft for Office, though. At least for now. > That way his share of OS sales will go from 3% to perhaps 48%, a > 1600% increase. Imagine being on-line buying a Dell and clicking a > Mac OSX Cheetah check box :-) It's logical to suppose that Windows > does need an opposition. Yep. The risk is that if they encroach too far on MS's territory they might be seen as a threat. That's probably not wise. > I'm not au fait with Carbon, Blue/Red/Yellow box, Fat/Thin/On-a-diet > binaries etc but I'm sure it eventually could be done. The only > question I would have is "can it be pirated?" And I'm sure there > would be other problems, but not insurmountable. I sincerely hope, for Apple's future, that it *can* be pirated. Why? Well, what better way to gain mindshare and increase the user base buying applications than to make it officially impossible - and against the license - to run MacOS/X on standard x86 boxes, but ensure that hacking it to work is never too hard. You keep your business sales and "joe avergage" home user sales, but more and more exclusively win32 users are exposed to MacOS/X. My personal suspicion is that they won't be able to /stop/ people running MacOS/X on standard hardware once they release the x86 port. It might have to be done via a virtualization layer akin to Mac-on-Linux, but I bet it'll happen. -- Craig Ringer
