So the words on everyone's lips are "hell froze over, IBM PowerPCs are old news, Apple will start using x86 technology from Intel in 2006, your move, Microsoft." I say, bring it on.
Apple had a nice, cozy niche carved out, helped out by good 'ol Uncle Bill and his $150 million investment, (if memory serves right), offered conveniently at the last moment before a probable utter failure, a moment which guaranteed the dominance of MSIE on preinstalled Mac desktops and millions made by Microsoft off Mac Office. Mac zealots blindly rejoiced the power of their grassroots little OS and Apple went on to make OSX and spread FUD about how it never crashes and is 100% desktop *nix and how it is 100% stable.
That was the first mistake that Apple made; you do not bite the hand that feeds you and saves your pretty, stylized face from failure; you obey. Apple failed to recognize its limits and continued to expand its product lines ("pioneering" readymade x64 platforms three times more expensive than a better white-box PC) and continuing to push products that had more bells and whistles than substance to them, while AMD and Intel worked hard at producing new, cheap, high-performance processors and Windows optimizations for the rest of the world.
Now, when Apple steps into the PC-compatible market, it needs to watch its step, lest it make its second and last, fatal mistake. Competing with companies established for over a decade is plain stupid; if anything, the upcoming release of Longhorn and the proliferation of continued Win2K and Win2K3 server use (let alone the family of other servers [Exchange, SQL, etc.] that Microsoft has been establishing in the market like crazy for a long time now) will only bolster support for Microsoft as a company that slowly, but steadily, climbs towards excellence. Apple, by comparison, will seem like a collection of grab-bag efforts, never carried to their logical conclusion; as far as I am concerned the first generation of everything Apple makes is always a disaster, whereas we PC users have been loving to hate Microsoft so much we have forgotten how much it has done for us and how far-reaching Microsoft implementation is.
Needless to say, now that the cross-platform barrier was broken, a double, counter-Apple niche will open. One niche will be for other PC-compatible system manufacturers (notably AMD) which will get their hands on Apple implementation soon enough. Even now, it seems analysts are getting cold feet for the deal:
According to Merrill Lynch's Osha, Intel can't lose, but it's not going to gain much, either.As well, according to current hardware builders, it doesn't look like that this seemingly-monumental switch will make even a ripple in the industry:"The implications for Intel are positive, but only marginally so," Osha concluded. "At 2 percent of the market, Apple's business is not enough to materially impact our supply/demand analysis. [...]"
Apple['s PowerPC production] only represents about 3 percent of Freescale [Semiconductor]'s total revenue and only 2 percent of its wafer production, [communications vice president Tim] Doke said.I doubt that Apple will be able to keep this agreement as exclusive to Intel as it has been with IBM for PowerPCs; regardless, hacking PC hardware will be much easier, mainly because of a higher volume of users.
The other niche will be for software manufacturers, since 90% of the world's application software (the stuff that actually makes money - whothe hell cares what server someone is running, in the end?) is developed, tested, purchased and used by PC-compatible users and it will be the PC-compatible Mac application market which will dominate the new Intel-Apple platform, not the other way around. Tthe world of Apple software has nothing to offer to PC users (for instance, Adobe and Macromedia products, the heavy hitters amongst these products, are always developed in parallel). What will happen when a flood of PC-compatible applications and games will hit the Mac software market and saturate it?
Indeed, the puppeteer's strings show all too well now, right in Apple's official press release. Here is Microsoft, claiming its territory:
"We plan to create future versions of Microsoft Office for the Mac that support both PowerPC and Intel processors," said Roz Ho, general manager of Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit. "We have a strong relationship with Apple and will work closely with them to continue our long tradition of making great applications for a great platform."And here is Adobe, all ready to carve Apple up from both sides:
"We think this is a really smart move on Apple's part and plan to create future versions of our Creative Suite for Macintosh that support both PowerPC and Intel processors," said Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe.
That's it, Apple, you have lost; just try not to get yourself utterly destroyed now. This is how losing works in the real world, not in terms of dramatic exclamations and clever remarks but by the manipulation of market dynamics and consumer loyalty. No amount of clever analysis can hide this fact.
I am incredibly happy. I could never stand the sheer arrogance and conceit of those holier-than-thou, untouchable-snob Mac users who think that just because they pay three times than me for a prettier box they are masters of the universe with their super-computers. It's time they got a taste of the real world.