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Apple's Colossal Disappointment?
Mudzy writes "Michael Roberson, founder of Linspire, has an article at The TechZone talking about Apple's 'Colossal Disappointment' for not porting Mac OS X to PC after they announced the move to Intel processors. He discuss why this could be a mistake." From the article: "Instead of a brilliant strategic maneuver, it's a step necessitated by IBM's inability to keep pace with Intel. It seems Apple was tired of losing the gigahertz competition to the PC world. Apple had been promising faster computers for some time and had not been able to deliver them. In addition, they were frustrated at IBM's inability to produce a fast low-powered chip for laptops."
Why the heck would they? If they did they most certainly would no longer be a hardware company.
Bogus. What Michael (the author of the linked article) seems to think is that Apple made the switch for entirely reasons of CPU speed. The reality is much more complicated than that and encompasses reasons of yes, CPU speed, but also platform flexibility, heat, management of media rights and others. I covered some of these reasons here back on June 9th, but the future of media management is central to their strategy and was one of the driving forces behind the move. Additionally, Michael goes on to state that Macintosh users will "first have to suffer through a period of uncertainty and forced upgrades.". I also talked about this in my article, but to summarize, there really is no uncertainty about this process. It is going forward and most users will not notice or care about whether their Macintosh has an Intel or a PPC inside of it. They just want their computers to work as seamlessly as they have before and help them manage their lives and be more productive. Users will not have to be making any tough decisions as both platforms will be supported for years and years to come. Apple has proven this ability by maintaining parity between the PPC and Intel codebases already since the beginning of OS X and is showing the industry how to proceed when it comes to backwards and forwards compatibility.
.......yeah. As we used to say when we were kids, "No Duh". Why would Apple want to get into the game of supporting literally millions of combinations of hardware compatibility issues and troubleshooting? Why? Where is the income from that going to come from? They already make available (and will continue to) make Darwin available for PPC and Intel, so if you want to swing that way, go for it.
Any other objection that Michael has to this switch has to do with OS X not being able to run on commodity PC hardware. Well,
Don't get me wrong. I really do appreciate what he has done with Linspire, but it is not OS X and I cannot imagine that Apple will simply hand over their technologies.
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Not sure I understand this, and it seems to be a relatively old story (last month already)...it seems to be more Michael Robertson's disappointment rather than Apple, with a tinge of sour grapes in the air. Anyway, the world is rapidly changing to make the whole Windows vs. Mac box competition to be relatively less interesting. With more applications and services moving off the desktop and into the network, the battleground is increasingly shifting online. Apple has already leveraged this move by becoming the number four vendor of personal computers, right behind Gateway on the recent numbers. Now they just need to start to race Microsoft to making more of their applications web-optimized and OS-agnostic. iTunes is a basic step in that direction. The portals are not standing still though...Yahoo!'s acquisition of Konfabulator is in my view a move toward making this new reality happen faster. More on that here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_yahoo_acquis.htm l
Apple is in the business of selling computers, not OSses. They're not going to support computers they didn't make themselves.
But who the hell is Michael Roberson, founder of Linspire to tell Apple's Steve Jobs how to run a successful computer company? Linspire has how much revenue/profit and how many users?
Ohh how quickly we forget about Power Computing, Power Max, Windows, and why this a bad idea.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
I'm incredibly dissapointed that Linspire will not run on my 1982 vintage casio wristwatch, but I sure hope they're working on it, I mean, wow! just think of how much marketshare they'd get if their OS could run on such inexpensive commodity hardware!
Starsucks
there is nothing at all stopping apple from doing exactly what this guy says...
When the conditions are most ripe...
when Apple is ready to face that challenge from a support perspective...
when Microsoft becomes more loathed with the release of Vista which will have 8,000 viruses out for it BEFORE its released...
you don't walk into a saloon and just start shooting up the place even if you're packing a big-ass gun. You wait to size up the situation, you make sure that you're transition to Intel is complete and solid, and you make your move when you want to.
Hell, just that very THREAT should be enough to keep Microsoft awake, pissing their pants at night. That's what the US military did to the Iraqi's the first Gulf War... we kept them awake for a whole 36 hours waiting for them to be so tired of staying awake, anticipating the strike that we did far more damage than if we had attacked at zero hour.
Don't be stupid and confuse shrewd business timing tactics for making bad decisions. This linspire guy has his head shoved up his ass if he thinks Jobs isn't interested in beating the stuffing out of Microsoft.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
After reading through the article, I'm not sure that I was convinced that it was in Apple's best interests to allow clones.
Look at it from Apple's point of view, the things he points out as negatives work more like positives:
1. Forced upgrades. Apple has announced "dual binary" support for their applications for an unspecified length of time, but either way the company has to be salivating at how many people will be buying new machines in 10 more months. And as recent reports show, they're selling more machine now than ever, so it would appear that the "halo effect" is greater than the "Osborne effect".
2. If Apple sales continue to do well after the final shift to Intel, then Apple can keep on their plans: make money off of computer and iPod sales (and whatever other new devices they come up with). Right now, they have a good line of movie editing software which only works on their software set (and they control the hardware to run it), they are developing other business tools (Pages and the like). So as long as people keep buying their machines and their market share is growing with the company making good profits, why change?
3. If, in some future, Apple decides to do cloning, it is in their best interest to do it later than sooner. My reasoning? They can use the next 10-36 months to iron out all of the issues dealing with the Intel transfer, see how the market reacts, how things like an "OS X WINE" works out, and so on. Then, with this expertise, they will be in a perfect position to dictate to cloners how things will work so the "Mac Experience" will be maintained, rather than just throwing the OS to the winds and hoping for the best.
Would I like it if Apple just let OS X free? Sure - but that's not in Apple's best interest. So, as long as they show a steady rise in profit and sales, I don't see them changing their minds any time soon. They seem to be doing what works, which probably makes them and their investors happy.
Of course, this is just my opinion. I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Now imagine how much control Apple has, knowing exactly what hardware their OS will be running on. They can do any number of things to optimize their OS and software to the hardware, and still keep their high level of stability.
Porting OSX out to everything would have also gotten rid of the sexy mac machines vs. the ugly beige PCs. And I am sure the MBAs out there will tell me that there are all kinds of money reasons that Apple wants to control their own hardware.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
This quote from him "I would love to see Apple's PC market share reverse its downward trend". Is pure FUD being sown by the Linspire folks. I think Linspire should focus on competing with the other Linux distros out there. For the last six months report after report has been showing Apple increasing their sales. i.e. PC units sold (+35% from the same quarter last year) and profitability primarily due to the iPod.
This is actually old news, as documented in Michael's Minute.
I'm sure Michael is bluffing. He knows that if Apple allowed OS X to run on commodity hardware Linspire's potential market would be marginalized even further... it could be devastating to the Linux desktop push. Why would he want such competition from Apple?
It's rather curious that a week after that, Michael stepped down from CEO of Linspire (check the Michael's Minute entitled "What's Our Purpose in Life") Cause-and-effect? Maybe. Correlation? Definitely.
Michael's not dumb. He feigned disappointment at the Apple on Intel announcement, but my guess is that it was a carefully orchestrated bluff to allow him to distance himself from Linspire in the weeks after.
Any company investing in LOTD with the hopes of profitability had better hope to god that Apple does not allow OS X to run on commodity hardware. It's just common sense.
Okay, let's look at this:
:)
;-)
1) Robertson criticizes Apple for not porting OS X to work on stock PCs.
2) Robertson happens to be the head of a company competing for those very desktops.
Why would he really want Apple to step into the market he himself is trying to gain market share in? Maybe, just maybe, he's riding on Apple's popularity as an opportunity to promote his own solutions?
Nah. That's just crazy.
(On a side note, I saw him give a presentation once, and before he started the presentation he asked how many people owned/used iPods. Only a few hands went up. Then, during his presentation where he spoke about their "LTunes" and their iTMS clone, he criticized iPod for being hard to use, saying thigns like "how do you turn this thing off? This thing is hard to use. We practiced turning it on, but we didn't practice turning it off..." I'm sorry, he's either so brain-dead he can't use a consumer electronics device with clearly labeled play and stop buttons on it, or he's playing to the ignorance of the crowd. The former makes him stupid, the latter makes him dishonest. And I don't think he's THAT stupid.
Apple's reason for switching to intel has nothing to do with more megahertz, better heat dissapation, DRM issues or any of the other crap that people have been spouting.
It comes down to one thing, they want to take on microsoft for control of the desktop. The way they are doing it is brilliant. They will switch to Intel based hardware made by Apple for the first year or so. They will then announce a deal with the HP and/or Dell allowing them to sell OSX with their hardware. After a year or so of that they will open up the floodgates and sell OSX to anyone and everyone.
What this means is that in 2 or 3 years time microsoft will have some real competition on the desktop (maybe even sooner, who knows). This also means the end of the line for linux on the desktop (linspire especially).
The reason they are implementing in these stages is simple - to keep attention on themselves. Apple will be in the news constantly the next 2 or 3 years, their stock price will continue to rise with all this attention, especially when wall street sees that each subsequent step apple takes leads to more more profit. Brilliant.
-ec
It was the Apple/IBM alliance's inability to agree on a mutually profitable path that would allow Apple to keep up. The PPC 970, based on POWER4, is a generation behind IBM's POWER5. IBM *can* put together a roadmap that will keep the PowerPC competitive with Intel. The question is whether Apple would buy enough of them to allow IBM to leverage economies of scale.
Why do people keep thinking Apple is a software company. Just because you want OS X on your PC doesn't mean it's a good idea for them to port it. A lot of what makes Apple Apple is the fact that they operate on a small range of rigorously controlled hardware.
There will *never* be a general PC release for OS X, their profit margin is just too good on their own hardware, why would they want to spawn a bunch of cheap competitors?
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The point of having a Mac with OSX, for Apple, is that they have *one*, very well defined platform to support, therefore they can concentrate on supporting it well. I don't own a Mac (well, a Mac 128 in my collection :-) but I understand that's how they define their business.
Now if they ported OSX so it could run on every PC, that means supporting a billion devices, or letting a billion drivers do who-knows-what and it would be a mess, just like Linux and Windows are (yes, I'm a Linux fan, don't give me shit I'm just being realistic here...)
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Some guy writes "Man Apple made a mistake and should have made their OS generic to PCs" and we treat it like its a new proposition. Welcome to 1990.
I'm not sure that the head of a major Linux company would be an apple "fanboy".
But hey, ignorance about who wrote the article for the win.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
Look IBM has world class fabs for SoC's, can do low power, high performance computing and have major mind share in the ASIC world. Their high volume/high profit market is not what Apple is selling. They did the PowerPC 970 for Apple and d they are the highest volume runner, which for IBM is the proverbial drop in the bucket. It adds more visibility but not revenue.
If Apple delivered more product or *gasp* payed IBM to develop low power processors for the laptop market, they couldn't complain. Should Apple have paid IBM for development when getting it from AMD/Intel in the x86 world would be free? No, but people should believe that it was because their vendor was incapable. It was just the Apple itself isn't significant enough to justify chip development with low payoff for IBM.
-Ho
Most copies of Windows come with a brand new computer. Dell probably pays less than $25 a pop for these, which is not a ton of revenue. When you factor in the costs of R&D, it's a shitty profit margin. They make their big bucks from applications like Office.
No, it really wouldn't. Microsoft only works because they're a monopoly. If Apple were to start behaving like a monopoly with 15% market share, they would die.
After all, Apple have significantly less resources to test OS X with the wide range of x86 hardware out there than Microsoft does, and even Microsoft can't get it right half the time. If they were to dedicate the required time and energy to making sure it worked on as many configurations as reasonable, OS X for x86 would put Longhorn to shame in the "RSN" department with all the delays it'd experience.
This is why geeks aren't in charge of companies. If I were to speculate, I'd say this is Apple's strategy.
to quote somebody who once had a one-shot success, "that is the stupidest idea I have ever heard of."
you think apple wants to enter the creaky world of "mad dog" peripherals and dock sweepings network cards, PCs with pushed speeds, and all sorts of marginal parts from mysterious outfits that come and go in the night? why in hell would anybody wish that support hell on them?
you control your hardware environment, you control the number of crash-and-burn intersices between hardware misbehaviors.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
If you're smart, you'll arrive at the Best of Both Worlds solution. Make MacOS X 100% compatible with off-the-shelf PC hardware...as long as you have the $300 Macintosh Compatibility PCI Card. What the card actually does is almost inconsequential, though such a design would actually offer some technical advantages, in addition to the more obvious and important business advantages.
Could have been a good, useful desktop OS.
But its just a shitty, unpolished Linux distro.
Oh well.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
The thing we need to be watching is not if Apple ports OSX to work on non-Apple hardware. We need to be watching how well the intel macs run Windows. If Apple does this - they win. Seriously, they win. Why? Every single person I know who has a mac and a windows machine ends up using OS X at every turn except when they have to use a Windows box. I have a PC and a Mac and I only use the mac for games and 3dsmax. If you can run windows dual booting on a powerbook you will see a corporate invasion of macs like nothing you've ever seen. Then, over time, you'll slowly see more and more native support of OS X apps while people look for any excuse to stop booting into windows.
-_-
Let's see how well that worked before for anybody except Microsoft.
Palm spins off PalmOS and licenses OS here and their hardware. Result: Palm corp gets nearly destroyed, Handspring merges back, and Windows Pocket takes off.
And then there's the fact that Steve Jobs tried exactly the same thing before, with nearly the same operating system back when it was grey instead of lickable: OPENSTEP.
How well were they able to keep up with drivers for modern hardware? Very poorly.
How well were they able to convince major PC makers to include OPENSTEP as pre-built option, at a competitive price? Not one bit.
Did this make NeXT Inc, stronger or weaker compared to when NeXT made hardware? Much weaker.
Jobs had a near-death experience doing exactly this strategy.
There's also the fact that this puts them in direct competition with Microsoft, attempting to copy Microsoft's business model, and competing with Microsoft for clients.
How well has this worked for IBM {OS/2}? Not very well at all.
How well does this work for Linux, which is even free and has zillions of people trying to write drivers? Only marginally, after 10 years. You can't easily click a button and get a Linux based Dell (especially a laptop) with everything pre-loaded, supported, and with all features working. After 10 years.
OS X changes *nothing*.
Microsoft would call up Dell and say, "ship MacOS X on one single box and your price on Windows will triple."
And that will be the end of OS X on PCs. They killed Be in this manner and they can and will do it again.
The average user isn't going to care about OS X any more than they did about MacOS. I doubt that most non Mac users have any idea what the difference is between MacOS and MacOS X.
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