Apple to go into the operating system business?

By Stan Beer
Wednesday, 02 April 2008 16:37

Opinion and Analysis

My Apple Fool's day story titled 'Apple to release PC version of Leopard in Q3 ' was eventually recognised as a spoof by most readers. However, there was a discernible sentiment from many readers expressing a wish that it was in fact true. Now that Macs and PCs are based on the same hardware architecture, could Apple actually successfully put Leopard up against Vista?

I believe that most people who have looked at both Vista and Leopard would agree that Leopard is far superior in all aspects - better functionality, usability, stability and so on. Most Mac users love Leopard while many Windows users say they hate Vista. As far as the current generation of proprietary operating systems is concerned, Apple delivered and Microsoft didn't.

Microsoft itself has flagged the fact that Vista is horribly over bloated and is already talking about its next much leaner product, the so-called Windows 7.

The take-up of Vista has been slow - much slower than Microsoft would have liked. However, Vista users still probably outnumber total Mac OS users simply because it is sold pre-installed as the default operating system on most OEM PCs and a high percentage of system builder white boxes.

Apple and Steve Jobs are to be congratulated on the great job they've done on resurrecting the Macintosh brand since the move was made to Intel architecture less than three years ago. 
Previous reports indicate that Mac market share in the US has grown to above 8%, with most of that growth naturally coming at the expense of Windows PCs. The question is how much more of the market can the Macintosh grab.

Many will argue that now Macs can run Windows, there is very little reason not to choose a Mac over all other computers. The problem is that the personal computing market has already demonstrated that users want a choice of hardware at least as much as they want a choice of software.