And the NYT has officially decided that they want to suck by refusing to
include the text of the article in their emails now!
Windows or Mac? Apple Says Both
By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO, April 5 - After long imploring computer users to "think
different" and defining the Macintosh as a lone bulwark against the
Windows onslaught, Apple Computer has decided to open the gate, at least a
bit.
Two decades after the first Mac arrived, Apple said Wednesday that it
would offer users of its latest models a simple way to run the Microsoft
Windows operating system as well as its own.
That means a single Apple computer will run programs written for either
the Mac or Windows, though it will have to shut down one system to start
the other.
The move was greeted with exuberance even among the loyal cult of
Macintosh enthusiasts who sustained Apple through many bleak years before
its resurgence on the strength of its iPod music player. Its sleek
machines have long been objects of consumer lust but are frequently passed
over in favor of more pedestrian computers that run Windows, leaving Apple
with about 5 percent of the personal computer market.
Wall Street analysts and computer industry experts also greeted the move
as an obvious and potentially lucrative one for Apple, whose stock jumped
almost 10 percent, ending the trading day at $67.21, up $6.04.
"The religion has changed," said Charles Wolf, a financial analyst at
Needham & Company, a New York investment firm. "Apple is saying we have
the chance to really build the Macintosh platform, and although there are
risks, we're going to do it."
Indeed, although much is still made of the rivalry between Apple and
Microsoft, and Steven P. Jobs, Apple's co-founder and chief executive, has
continued to poke fun at Microsoft's struggles to modernize Windows, Apple
has steadily moved to accommodate itself to the rest of the computing
world.
Shortly after he returned to Apple in 1997, Mr. Jobs persuaded Microsoft
to commit to make its Office software run on his computers and invest in
his company. More recently, in 2003, he developed a version of his popular
iTunes software that runs on Windows-based computers, giving him an
opening to sell his wildly popular iPods to tens of millions of PC users.
Last year Mr. Jobs stunned the computer world by announcing that he would
break away from his alliance with I.B.M. and recreate the Macintosh based
on Intel microprocessors. It was the switch to Intel chips, long the
standard in the Windows world, that opened the door to Mac-Windows
harmony.
Through all of these moves, Mr. Jobs has managed to maintain his loyal
base of customers. In fact the Macintosh religion can still be palpably
felt among those who have remained loyal to the user-friendly computer
even as its market share dipped below 3 percent.
"I love the Mac platform, I just hope I won't have to boot Windows even
for Photoshop in a few years," Alexandros Roussos, a student at the
University of Paris who is founder and editor of the MacCulture network, a
group of Web sites for Macintosh enthusiasts.
Wednesday's move also won an important endorsement from Apple's other
co-founder, Stephen G. Wozniak, who long ago left the company but remains
a vocal Macintosh user and is idolized by the Mac faithful.
"It's a great thing for Apple," he told a reporter by e-mail. "I don't see
the earth being rocked, but I can now recommend Apple hardware to a lot
more people. One pitch is that if Windows gets too frustrating and
unbearable and unsafe, then they can easily switch."
And Microsoft took the opportunity to salute the move, and itself.
"Windows is a great operating system," a Microsoft statement said. "We're
pleased that Apple customers are excited about running it, and that Apple
is responding to meet the demand."
But even as it introduced the new capability, in the form of a free
program called Boot Camp available for download, Apple tried with
not-so-subtle body language to play down its significance.
Ever the showman, Mr. Jobs had been accused of excess in a recent product
introduction, when he called reporters to Apple's headquarters on short
notice for a presentation that included a leather glove to protect the
finish of an iPod music player. But he was nowhere in evidence for
Wednesday's announcement, which was made in a simple news release.
Word of the new offering was not visible Wednesday morning on the front
page of Apple's Web site, which usually trumpets new products and
capabilities. Instead, to obtain the Boot Camp software, it was necessary
to navigate to an inside page on the Web site, where the download button
was buried in a small box.
"Obviously ever since the Macintosh was moved to Intel, we've been getting
this question from customers," said Philip W. Schiller, Apple's senior
vice president for worldwide product marketing, explaining the Windows
decision. "We always said it's possible."
Its muted announcement notwithstanding, Apple did a significant amount of
technical work to make Windows run cleanly on a Macintosh computer. Part
of the challenge was writing software modules called device drivers that
connect the Microsoft software to the Macintosh hardware components like
disk drives and t $199 or more.
Apple said Wednesday that it planned to make the Boot Camp capability a
standard feature of the next version of OS X, which is expected to be
introduced later this year or in early 2007.
Entering the mainstream of the computing world might undermine one of
Apple's greatest selling points recently: that the Macintosh has been
largely immune to computer viruses and other malicious software.
But because the Macintosh programs are shut down when Windows to read and
write information to the Macintosh file system, Mr. Schiller minimized the
risk that Macintosh users might be taking in adding Boot Camp.
To be sure, this is not the first time that a Macintosh has been able to
run Windows software. At one time Macs could be outfitted with special
cards that ran Intel processors, and more recently several companies have
produced software emulators that permitted Windows and Macintosh programs
to coexist. But those were improvised solutions, with sluggish results.
Several companies, including VMware, a subsidiary of the data storage
company EMC, are working on a technology that slips a thin layer of
instructions underneath the existing Macintosh operating system. Such an
approach would conceivably allow the Macintosh to run Macintosh, Windows
and Linux programs simultaneously at full speed.
A number of analysts and software developers said Apple's greatest risk
was that by opening its machines to Windows software it might
inadvertently chill the enthusiasm of software developers for producing
programs to run with the Mac operating system.
The potential downside was far outweighed by the opportunity to expand the
number of Macintosh users, Mr. Schiller said, which is a central factor in
attracting software developers.
"We thought long and hard about this," he said. "At the end of the day,
the most important factor is Mac market share."
Mr. Wolf, the Needham & Company analyst, said that he had done several
user surveys since Apple's shift to Intel to measure the potential sales
increase from a Windows-compatible Mac, and that user enthusiasm had come
back so strong that he had distrusted his results.
He said the biggest and most immediate increase would come in home and
education markets in the United States; Apple has 14.8 percent of the
elementary and secondary education market, and 5.1 percent of the home
market, according to the market research firm IDC.
"It will double Apple's share in these markets," he said.
But in the ranks of Mac veterans on Wednesday, some remained leery of
crossing the threshold.
"I had the Windows disk halfway into my MacBook Pro," said Jason D.
O'Grady, the editor of Powerpage.org, a Macintosh enthusiast site. Then he
recalled the reports he had heard about the risks of exposing unprotected
Windows-based computers to the Internet and how quickly they could become
infected.
"I thought to myself, 'Do I have an entire afternoon to waste?' " he said.
--
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act,
but a habit."
-- Aristotle
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