A few thoughts:
(1) This is a great time for the Mac! Congratulations!
The G5s promise to be everything that one could have hoped for and more (except for minor nit-picking, which we choose not to do) - and the promise of scaling to 3000 MHz over the next year on dual 64-bit processors with a 1 GHZ front side bus with a 64-bit MacOS is pretty amazing stuff.
Whoda thunk it?
My head is spinning.
The high end user who waits six months or so to buy, while the early adopters are getting burned, is going to be one very, very happy camper.
Long term, the alliance with IBM looks like a real win for Apple.
(2) The Slate (owned by Microsoft) article suggesting that there can only be two major OS contenders in the ring - is interesting.
I had not heard the argument before. On the surface, it certainly sounds plausible. Perhaps even compelling.
What the argument seems to overlook is that the Mac OS 10.x and the various Linux distributions are are all *nix plus gui's.
It is apparently not that difficult to migrate an application from Linux to Mac OS X - or vice versa. Not trivial, certainly. But not that difficult.
I believe that the GIMP and Open Office either have been ported or are on their way from Linux to Mac OS 10.x. I dunno if much of anything is really flowing in the opposite direction. I'm not sure which way Mozilla goes - or if Mozilla is so multi-platform that it doesn't really go from one platform to the other, but has more of a "starfish" distribution model.
My counter-thesis to the Slate article - developers need not choose between supporting Microsoft and Macintosh vs. supporting Microsoft and Linux, as the article seems to suggest. Developers now also have the choice of supporting Microsoft and *nix variants.
Each developer will call the shots as he sees fit. For example, the music people do not seem to be in any rush to port their Macintosh OS 10.x applications over to Linux. Why not, I asked an old friend who writes Macintosh music software for a living?
"Because I write Macintosh music software for a living," he said, a bit testily "and Linux people don't pay for software."
Uh - sounds pretty reasonable to me.
But then - someone from a poorer country is gonna try to make his mark by cobbling something together. Or some music hardware vendor is going to find it in in his best interest to fund Linux software development for his particular device.
Eventually something will come along.
Maybe not great - particularly not at first. Maybe not as complete as the Apple offering. Certainly not as innovative.
But eventhually it will be good enough. Good enough.
And it will be free.
It's all kinda Darwinian.
The niches that are empty will be filled.
One way or another.
(3) << I still see Linux making bigger inroads into Commerce than the Desktop. >>
<< The way Linux has been going uphill, I wouldn't be surprised if they climb past apple sooner than what your link states SB. >>
<< Linux has some strong points, $$ is one, community is another, and their reputation for being useful is growing. >>
The various predictions of Linux desktop market share overcoming Macintosh desktop market share over the next year or two are beginning to become interesting.
No way to tell unless and until it actually happens, of course.
But it is actually beginning to look like it might be real.
No - we are not talking high-end Photoshop users here, thank you.
We are talking primarily about us bottom feeders. :-)
Governments seem to be leading the way: they typically can switch over massive numbers of desktops in one fell swoop.
One nice thing is, in a sense anyway, is that this is not a market that is being taken from the Mac. These are largely losses for Microsoft.
To some extent, in regards to Microsoft, Mac hits 'em high and Linux hits 'em low.
How much market share Microsoft might actually lose from this dual one-two attack? One (1) percentage point? Even more?
There is no way of telling until it happens.
If I was Microsoft, I would sleep well at night: forty billion dollars in the kitty makes a awfully nice cushion.
A few examples of the large scale low-end Linux migrations that are happening now:
Munich - switches over to Linux on 14,000 municipal desktops
Lower Saxony - switches over to Linux on 11,000 government desktops
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/st...,982275,00.htmlExtremadura, Spain: Linux on 80,000 government desktops. Primarily schools, but also 33 community computer centers:
<< The centers have drawn citizens of all ages and walks of life. The oldest user of the centers is 99 years old. >>
http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/cb_hea...der_file=headerLargo Florida municipal government - 450 Linux thin clients, 900+ users
http://newsforge.com/newsforge/02/12/04/23...15.shtml?tid=19I am not really seeing these kind of governmental migrations moving from Microsoft onto the Macintosh platform.
Different niches.
All the above ignores the server market, of course, where Linux already does fairly well.
Regards,
Epaminondas
