Why Apple should consider Wintel

Last week, two major events showed the decreas­ing power of the Oper­at­ing Sys­tem: the first one was the release of Fire­fox and the sec­ond was the release of Kon­fab­u­la­tor on the Win­dows plat­form. All this got me think­ing about how we relate to our oper­at­ing sys­tems and in par­tic­u­lar, about how I relate to the oper­at­ing sys­tem plat­form I use.

I know mac users will prob­a­bly flame me for this but I believe that the direct result of this is the need for Apple to start tak­ing a seri­ous look at more of a cross-platform approach. Before you send me irate emails, how­ever, real­ize that I am a mac user (we have sev­eral macs at home and I use an iBook as my pri­mary machine, largely due to the small foot­print fac­tor (there are pre­vi­ous few 10 inch screen com­put­ers in this world and I am among the list of odd­balls that pre­fer that form fac­tor when it comes to porta­bles)) and that I only want to see the best for Apple, a com­pany that exudes cool­ness when it comes to mar­ket­ing and design but one that may be los­ing the war in the con­sumer space.

Why I feel now is the time for Apple to con­sider a change

Over the past few years, Apple has made great head­ways in the music busi­ness, first with the iPod, which now holds a sub­stan­tial lead over all of its com­peti­tors, and later with the iTunes Music Store, which has solid­i­fied the company’s posi­tion in the emerg­ing world of dig­i­tal music. Much of that suc­cess, I believe, stems from a smart deci­sion to look beyond the mac and start offer­ing like-for-like prod­ucts on the win­dows plat­form. First, it was an iPod that could work with Win­dows, and then it was iTunes for Win­dows. His­tor­i­cally, Apple has had many suc­cesses on the Win­dows plat­form. Look, for exam­ple, at the suc­cess of Quick­time, which still rep­re­sents a dom­i­nat­ing force in the world of dig­i­tal video. I believe the embrace of either Win­dows or Intel as a plat­form (in the exam­ples I’ve given, it is the com­bi­na­tion of both) always ben­e­fits Apple as a com­pany. Every time Apple has offered a prod­uct on those plat­forms, it’s been suc­cess­ful. Let’s look at dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions and the advan­tages and/or pit­falls of that approach.

Apple and Intel

It’s hardly a secret that Apple has switched CPU providers in the past. While their rela­tion­ship with Motorola sus­tained them through the 80s and 90s, the move to the G5 archi­tec­ture showed a will­ing­ness to switch provider. In that case, the provider became IBM, ie. the other provider of Pow­erPC chip. Who’s to say that Apple could not start hold­ing dis­cus­sion with Intel, look­ing to them as a provider of chips for their platform?

One of the pos­si­ble com­bi­na­tion here would be to port the Mac OSX oper­at­ing sys­tem to the Intel plat­form. The bot­tom line would be a new mar­ket for Apple soft­ware prod­uct and a third alter­na­tive to Win­dows and Linux on the Intel plat­form. Dar­win, the under­ly­ing core of OSX, is based on BSD. It has already been ported to the Intel plat­form and BSD itself has a rich his­tory of dis­tri­b­u­tions run­ning on Intel proces­sor.

The advan­tage of this approach is that it would make OSX avail­able to a much wider pub­lic. This could trans­late into higher soft­ware sales for Apple (which pro­vides a more end-user focused prod­uct than Linux at this time and a more secure prod­uct than Win­dows at this time) and could allow for a rise in the num­ber of devel­op­ers for the OSX plat­form as the poten­tial of a larger mar­ket could enlarge the whole eco-system. One could fore­see a time when iLife would be offered on that plat­form and Apple could use this as a seed for their new prod­uct offering.

On the down­side, is the com­pe­ti­tion pre­sented by Win­dows and Linux. By some accounts, Apple is now in dan­ger of becom­ing the third most pop­u­lar Oper­at­ing Sys­tem, behind Linux and Win­dows. How­ever, one could look at this approach as a way to stem some of the losses. Another down­side would be that Apple hard­ware would no longer be tied to the OS itself so peo­ple who want the fea­tures of OSX would not have to buy Apple hardware.

By offer­ing their oper­at­ing sys­tem on Intel proces­sor, Apple could find itself with a grow­ing mar­ket again in the OS world, pro­vid­ing a solid main­stream con­sumer alter­na­tive to Win­dows. On the down­side, it could be can­ni­bal­iz­ing its own hard­ware sales.

Apple and Windows

All this brings me to part two of the Win­tel Strat­egy: Win­dows machine from Apple. It is unde­ni­able that the look and feel, the design, and the mar­ket­ing of Apple hard­ware exude cool­ness. The hard work that the Apple design team puts in its prod­ucts is a large part of the company’s con­tin­ued rel­e­vance in the mar­ket and few com­pa­nies (Sony and Alien­ware are the only ones that come to mind) in the indus­try have the kind of fol­low­ing that Apple hard­ware enjoys.

If Apple started offer­ing hard­ware that ran with Trans­meta CPUs and could run Win­dows soft­ware, one could see an upsurge in the sales of lap­top and desk­tops as part of the Apple busi­ness. For the last few years, sales of macs have been slug­gish at best and I believe that part of the prob­lem is a skit­tish­ness on the part of con­sumers to be locked into the Apple world, forced to use only Apple hard­ware and soft­ware. With the soft­ware being lib­er­ated, Apple could look to a slow migra­tion of its hard­ware plat­form to Trans­meta proces­sors (AMID or Intel could also be contenders).

Why Trans­meta? Well, my think­ing is that the Trans­meta approach is to do software-based proces­sor units through code mor­ph­ing. If they were to offer a G5 equiv­a­lent of their mor­ph­ing soft­ware. This would estab­lish a base line in terms of offer­ing equiv­a­lence with cur­rent hard­ware. The next step would be to offer the same hard­ware but with the Trans­meta Intel-based chips, which could then run the win­dows or Linux plat­form (or any other Intel-based OS). Users who want to expe­ri­ence the cool­ness fac­tor of own­ing a mac would be able to do so and still run the apps that some­how kept them from mov­ing to OSX.

On the down­side, Apple would not nec­es­sar­ily hold much of a lead with the oper­at­ing sys­tem. As more and more Intel-like sys­tems go out the door, Apple could loose some of the remain­ing mar­ket share they hold in the oper­at­ing sys­tem. Another poten­tial down­side would be the com­modi­ti­za­tion of the hard­ware plat­form. How­ever, I believe they would still be able to hold patents on their designs and con­tinue pro­duc­ing prod­ucts that look cool.

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

Some peo­ple will prob­a­bly dis­miss these con­cepts as plain nuts and I have to admit that it takes quite a leap of faith. To me, how­ever, that leap of faith was made by Apple with the iPod and I believe that they can make it again as a way to increase their over­all mar­ket share.

The over­all down­side of this strat­egy is that it might anger fans, who are noto­ri­ously devoted to the com­pany. How­ever, Apple has not really wor­ried about this much in the past. In the 90s, the com­pany started OEM­ing their hard­ware plat­form but decided to pull back when some ven­dors started rep­re­sent­ing real com­pe­ti­tion (remem­ber PowerComputing?)

The ques­tion is whether Apple wants to remain a niche player in the com­puter mar­ket. Based on the last quar­terly report, it seems that most of the growth is com­ing from the music busi­ness. So maybe this would be a good way to rein­vig­o­rate the com­put­ing part of the business.