Sun Tzu on The Art Of War:
In all fighting, the direct method may be used for joining battle, but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory.Indirect tactics, efficiently applied, are inexhaustible as Heaven and Earth, unending as the flow of rivers and streams. Like the sun and moon, they end but to begin anew. Like the four seasons, they pass away to return once more.
Somebody at Apple seems to have studied with the Master. Apple’s OS-X has adapted to the signature chipset of its adversary: Intel.
In addition, OS-X fields exclusive graphic and music solutions that appeal to certain segments, while pressing the security benefits of a BSD-derived operating system.
And now comes the Third Column. Parallels Desktop lets users run most Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris or MS-DOS programs alongside your OS-X programs, at the same time, without rebooting. You can even cut and paste between your Windows and OS-X apps in real time.
Applefolk claim that, although you must also buy the desired competitive operating system software to make the whole thing work, you now have the flexibility to use your favorite software for every task at hand.
A powerful enticement.
So what’s preventing the Windows community from stampeding to Appletel?
For many, it’s the hardware. While Apple’s hardware is easy on the eyes, experienced Wintellers complain that they don’t like centrally planned choices of everything from graphics hardware to DVD drives. And they often add that Apple hardware is simply too wimpy and unreliable to justify the asking price.
The solution? OS-X for All… the Whitebox Edition.
Once OS-X “legally” runs on a whitebox, Apple will have a new army at its disposal, as VARs offer “best of” solutions carefully crafted to outmaneuver the Windows-only Dells and HPs of the world.
This, in turn, will pump up the ranks of Apple developers.
Who knows? Between open sourcers and OS-X for All, Apple may finally offer a competitive alternative to Windows that offers enough camouflage for corporate and government CYA-types to make the move.
So what’s it going to take?
Apple needs to loosen up. Support as much not-invented-here hardware as possible, and relax the dealer and developer edicts.
At that point, the O/S wars will be afoot… And for the first time in a long time, the outcome won’t be certain.
18 comments
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June 15th, 2006 at 4:43 pm
Paul Johnson
Cloning = death of Apple.
June 15th, 2006 at 4:59 pm
John Roberts
Read DaringFireball for the many reasons why Apple has zero interest in having its software run on non-Apple machines. Effectively, Apple is a hardware company. No money in letting those margins go.
June 15th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
Donald Michael Kraig
Your post makes an assumption: Apple is a software company. Nothing could be further from the truth. Apple is a hardware company. They make software so that their hardware will sell.
If Apple makes a “whitebox” version available, they will totally destroy their financial model, ruin their sales, and destroy the company.
June 15th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
Paul Johnson
After seeing Vista Beta 2, we should know that there will soon be only 3 significant differences between Windows and Mac OS X: (1) the limitations of hardware-software integration and the level of system resource requirements in comparing an operating system that takes on the burden of being able to run on any X86 computer and tries to be fully back-compatible versus an operating system that runs on a selected group of computers and is willing to break old software; (2) the effects of previous decisions about user-interface interactions on productivity–that is, those decisions that can be altered only at great cost; and (3) the level of administrator vs. ordinary user access to the operating system (and related warning messages) that better balances security with flexibility. Each company can copy or extend the other’s features. The only question is whether Apple’s pace of innovation can stay ahead of Microsoft’s ability to coopt it to be “good enough.”
June 15th, 2006 at 6:31 pm
Myles
FreeBSD is the WhiteBox OS you are looking for.
June 15th, 2006 at 7:32 pm
Charles Blackmon
Overheating Macs and notebooks tell ME one thing Apples’s NOT is a HARDware company.
June 15th, 2006 at 8:29 pm
mick4394
Apple’s not a hardware company or a software company. It’s a hype machine, built on the insecurities of hippies still trying to stick it to the man.
June 15th, 2006 at 9:20 pm
BJ Gillette
@John Roberts, Donald Michael Kraig & Paul Johnson:
I saw no major points of disagreement with DaringFireball… except, perhaps, the implication that Mac users have superior, more refined sensibilities. Along those lines, he claims, “Mac OS X is better than Windows if you care about user interface design; if you don’t, though, it’s just different, not better.”
A more accurate statement may be, “If you appreciate OS X’s interface design and security environment more than the backward compatibility, broad hardware flexibility and software availability offered by Windows, OS X is the environment for you.”
On the other hand, if your value system leans toward fast, powerful, 24×7x365 equipment… Even DaringFireball admits, “For most of the past 20 years, PCs offered more raw computing performance than Macs. These are facts, but that hasn’t stopped some Mac users from trying to deny them.”
That pretty much sums up the non-Apple community’s view of Apple Macs. Take away the operating system, you’re left with Sony Vaios *sans* muscle, ergo, OS X *is* the real source of value derived from computing.
In the end, it seems, we agree on all points but one.
You can’t imagine Apple deploying its strengths in a new and imaginative way to strike Microsoft while Apple’s strong and its enemy is weak and confused.
I can. And so would Sun Tzu.
@Myles.
I’m not looking. Thanks anyway.
@mick4394
Interesting insight.
June 15th, 2006 at 9:39 pm
Paul Johnson
Let’s hope you and Sun Tzu are right!
June 15th, 2006 at 9:53 pm
toxicfreak
apple should understand that one way or the other they will get pirated and install on a whitebox the only question is when will it be wide spread .
if apple could only see there reality they would storm window monopoly like a wildfire .
June 16th, 2006 at 2:01 am
john doe
the only reason Apple uses Intel chips now is for national security. NSA and other agencies have mandated one vendor for all microprocessors on all US-made PCs. Chips are designed in Isreal and designed to be reverse-engineerable and remotely sabotagable.
June 16th, 2006 at 8:13 am
BJ Gillette
@Paul.
Keywords: “I can *imagine*…”
I can also imagine Apple doing what Apple has always done. So would Sun Tzu.
June 16th, 2006 at 9:08 am
James K. Lowden
“Apple is a hardware company.” Digital Equipment thought so too, despite the fact they made the best OS ever. Look what happened to them.
Apple is a hardware company only because it’s not a software company. It could price the OS such that it didn’t care whether you by the OS or the machine. How many it could sell, who knows?
As for drivers, Apple would have to make Darwin freely available again. Then kernel development could adapt “in the wild”, and Apple could cry “but the hardware” all the way to the bank.
June 17th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
Lawrence D’Oliveiro
The problem with letting people run OS X on their own choice of x86 hardware is you then have an order of magnitude or two explosion in the kinds of hardware that you have to support. Microsoft has long been accustomed to this, and so have the Linux folks, but Apple has not. I don’t think it’s ready for the kind of effort this would involve.
June 18th, 2006 at 8:16 pm
Chris
On thing most of the posters miss in the the whole thing: “Think different”. When linux and windows administrators/users say that it cannot change because that is the way it has always been done, then it is, indeed a time for change. Apple seems to understands this.
June 18th, 2006 at 9:59 pm
Paul Johnson
So, Chris, what kind of change are you proposing that Apple understands?
June 19th, 2006 at 12:40 pm
Jason
john doe with the Evil empire comments, you DO know that not a single macintosh with an Intel chip has been manufactured in the US, right? and that in fact, the vast majority of all computers are made in China? So maybe you can relax and worry about the chinese, and relax about israel for now.
June 20th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
jeremy
You forgot, it’s all the Joooos fault for trying to take over the world, they are going to reverse engineer Intel Chips so that they have establish a Zionist empire.