Dvorak Mostly Right About Apple and Windows

Remember back in February when Dvorak’s column in PC Magazine, Will Apple Adopt Windows?, got the Apple Kool-Aidites up in arms? Well, it looks now like he was mostly right in his prediction.

Before I invoke the ire of Mac fanatics, let me first state that I believe Dvorak is wrong on one key point: Apple will not stop development of OS X in favor of Windows. OS X is a far superior operating system to Windows and is the only thing Apple offers that PC manufactures absolutely can not. Dvorak claims Apple is primarily a hardware company and it is therefore in Apple’s best interest to sell more computers. Well, if Apple became nothing more than a high end PC manufacturer, as Dvorak suggests they will, then Apple would have no outstanding competitive advantage over other high end PC makers. If, on the other hand, Apple were a high end PC manufacturer offering OS X then there would be a huge advantage to buying a Mac, and that advantage is OS X. Why would Apple throw away such a huge advantage? Moreover, this is exactly what Apple has become, and will so all the more with the release of OS X Leopard in early 2007.

Dvorak’s closing paragraph is prophetic: “Luckily, Apple has a master showman, Steve Jobs. He’ll announce that now everything can run on a Mac. He’ll say that the switch to Windows gives Apple the best of both worlds.”

To see the related video from Apple go here and then choose Touché.

Running Windows on a Mac via Parallels is actually the perfect thing to boost Mac sales – better than Boot Camp. With Boot Camp it’s either Windows XP or OS X and you have to choose one at startup and can only change the OS via a restart. That’s not going to win Window’s users over to OS X even if they buy a Mac because they’ll likely have Windows running 99% of the time and will only run OS X when they are in the mood to figure out what this other-thing-is-that-my-computer-can-do-that-everyone-keeps-talking-about (like old-school make fans toying with UNIX from time to time). Parallels is a far better option because it runs inside of OS X, thus encouraging users to get familiar with OS X while weaning themselves off XP and allowing them to continue using that one app they must have that is only available for Windows.

My guess is that Leopard will natively offer something similar to Parallels (perhaps in addition to Boot Camp, which offers speeds indispensable to hardcore PC gamers) for running Windows XP in OS X and we’ll all be able to purchase a Mac from Apple with Windows XP Pro pre-installed as a built-to order option for around $140, or less for Home Edition. Notice also that Apple’s Windows site mentions Parallels Desktop instead of Boot Camp. Why $140? A Windows XP Pro OEM copy costs about $140. (See here for an explanation of buying Windows OEM). Whether this will spell the end to development of certain Mac software apps such as Microsoft Office for OS X will probably depend on whether five years from now most Windows-come-Mac users are spending the majority of their time running native OS X apps or Windows apps through the next generation virtualized Windows OS on the Mac OS. As Dvorak puts it, “Business eventually trumps sentimentality in any large company.” We will all have to wait and see whether it would be cost effective for Microsoft to continue developing Office for OS X five years from now.

At least one thing is indisputable, Apple indeed gives us the best of both worlds.

Tags Apple, OS X, Windows XP, Dvorak, Leopard

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