When they encounter a big item of news, people who write blogs about technology seem to have a special penchant for writing posts that begin with some variation on “in case you’ve been living under a rock for the last week…”. I believe this is a sort of disclaimer you use when you feel you need to say something about the big news, but you expect that your readers will probably already know about it. You’re late, but at least you admit it.
In my case, I do not write a blog about technology. I write a blog with no theme whatsoever, on a wildly sporadic basis that pretty much guarantees I have nothing but particularly determined readers, or at least ones who have at some point been interested enough in something I wrote to subscribe via RSS or LiveJournal. If anyone has been under a rock it is me, and for a considerably longer period than a week.
The other day, in the single unlikeliest move since their last extremely unlikely move, Apple released some software called Boot Camp that lets you run Windows on the new Intel-based Macs.
Even by Apple’s standards, this is a risky move. On one hand, lots of people say they would like to use a Mac, if only they didn’t have to test websites on the Windows version of Internet Explorer, or use a specialised application at work that doesn’t have a Windows version, or play whatever the cool game is now. I don’t know, I don’t follow the games so much. Based on what people say, there would appear to be a large market of people who would like to use a Mac most of the time, but have to use Windows for a few things.
On the other hand, there’s a very real danger that if you can run Windows software on a Mac, in a couple of years’ time software companies will decide it’s not worth making Mac-specific versions of their software. That happened to the Commodore 128, which never got much software written for it because it could run Commodore 64 software, and to IBM’s OS/2, which in practice mostly ran Windows applications. From now on, if people are going to keep writing Mac software, Apple’s going to have to provide them with pretty convincing reasons.
Apparently they’re pretty confident of this. It makes me nervous.
Isaac,
First, I supposed I should introduce myself. I’m a Baha’i who works in Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit. The Baha’i bit is how I found your blog, and the Mac BU bit constitutes my credentials for commenting on this subject.
The thing to remember about both the Commadore 128 and IBM’s OS/2 is that neither offered sufficiently compelling benefits over and above the entities with which they were compatible. The key phrase is “sufficiently compelling.” Each offered benefits, but not enough people found those benefits worth pursuing either of those products for their own value.
The same cannot be said of the Mac. People who already buy Macintoshes don’t buy them in order to run Windows. To them, Windows is an inferior operating system, and any Mac is going to be a relatively expensive way to run an operating system for the same level of performance.
Boot Camp, while marginally adding some value to the Mac, doesn’t detract from the already compelling reasons that people find in owning a Macintosh.
Don’t be quite so nervous. The Macintosh, and Mac OS X, isn’t going to go away any time soon.
Hi Rick, great to hear from you - I’ve always been impressed with the Mac BU’s work.
I certainly agree that the situation for Apple now isn’t nearly as dire as it was for the C128 or OS/2. Whether it’s sufficiently comeplling or not (it is for me, but we Mac users do seem to be in a minority), it does have a large, long-established developer community and plenty of existing software that doesn’t need to be ported from anywhere else. For the most part, the Mac software market doesn’t depend very much on ports from Windows.
However, if it’s a calculated risk, I still think it’s a risk. I know that Microsoft is commited to producing Office for OS X at least for the next five years, but if I were making decisions at Adobe, say, I’d have to ask myself whether it made sense to continue developing Photoshop for OS X in parallel with Windows, especially given that Apple is already more or less forcing them to reimplement the whole thing using XCode to support universal binaries.
“Nervous” is something of an overstatement on my part, though. I’m sure nobody at Apple needs to be told about OS/2, and they wouldn’t be making this move if they didn’t know it was worth it.