Upside has published an article regarding Mac OS X and its potential impact on Apple's sales, noting that the operating system alone may not be enough to provide Apple with any signficant boost given the current state of the PC industry.
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UNIX is hot right now-- look at LINUX on the X86 platform. People are tired of old-fashioned OS's-- like the current Mac OS and all flavors of Windoze-- which can crash and lose your work. OS X will 1) look cool 2) be supported by a fortune 500 company 3) come on cool looking hardware. I'd be surprised if it does'nt do wonders for Apple's marketshare
The Doom & Gloom focus is on Market Share and how Apple plans to increase its little world with Mac OS X?
Apple may release Mac OS X and be a success. Apple may continue to sell hardware with its very own software on top of OS X...
The fact remains that Apple will now be pushing a new OS along with free "i" series of applications to add value to the Mac?
hmm! I wonder how long they will continue to pursue the consumer market before they realize the enterprise market is the way!
I always belive what these journalist say. After all they are the experts.
I, for one, liked this article. They didn't say anything like "amazing system but they should really sell out to (insert some random company name here)" so I think it is at least worth reading. It is a good point about how this won't be a huge drive to hardware sales but I think it will pump up the market share a bit for some of the *nix guys out there that were always annoyed with the lack of "guts" in the MacOS. I do, however, disagree with what they said about "coolness doesn't sell." I am a hard-core nerd so I tend to hang-out in computer stores often and I have seen people come in and buy an iMac simply because they said it would look great to have on the reception desk in their small business even though they then have to spend a few $100 getting some software and hardware to make their specific task hardware compatible with it. I also know many big Windows guys who say that they would buy a Cube if it were cheaper just because of the look of it. It isn't enough to reverse an economic slow-down but it isn't a force to ignore.
Anyway, this made some good points and I am still excited about Apple's future with the OS X release next month,
~/indigo
Does the author actually believe that Mac users expect the world to dump their windows machines and flock to MacOS X.
Don't insult are intelligence. MacOS X will win some converts but there won't be a mass conversion to the Mac platform. I don't think anyone expects that.
Mac OS X will bring a revival of high-end 3D graphics on the Mac.
Maya is already commited, others will most likely follow.
Mac OS X is UNIX, it has OpenGL, it has the Velocity Engine support both in the OS itself and as added by software developers making the OS extremely attractive.
Linux is used because its faster and more stable than Windoze. However Linux lacks real commercial support by a real computer company and lacks the specialized processing of the G4 which can run Dual, Quad or more.
Also the insides of the OS are available. Maybe a server farm of Darwin running Quad rack-mounted G4s is not too far off.
I am sure Pixar will migrate over some of their software to OS X once it ships for the reasons stated above.
THAT is how you grow marketshare, by moving into areas you were previously not able to reach or had lost due to other reasons (such as the onslaught of Linux and before that Windoze NT).
Digital Video is also rising to become the "next big thing" and guess who is there on the bleeding edge with a very fast, stable OS that runs on great hardware for digital video. Oh yeah Apple also has a LOT of DV software solutions now and some new hardware to back it up.
Marketshare is not always about how many Business Drones or Uncle Joe's use a cheapy PeeCee to email and play solitaire, it includes real work done by professionals who will pay high prices for both hardware and software if it gets their job done FASTER and BETTER than what they had before - even if its six months old and a completely different platform (Linux, NT).
No Fortune 500 company supporting UNIX? How about Sun? They have a thing called Solaris.
No major company supporting Linux? How about IBM: projected $1 billion investment this year, with Linux running on all its systems.
DV video hot? Maybe on the consumer desktop and in the low-end. But the high-end professional user wants Avid or Discreet hardware (maybe Quantel at a pinch). Full-stop. If Avid gets its arse into gear and starts porting Symphony and some of its graphics apps to OS X and not just Media Composer, and Discreet decides to port its SGI-based stuff to OS X, then Macs may claw back the marketshare Apple started to lose to NT about three years back.
Recent builds rock. X will be a great thing for the future of Apple. Will Apple become the dominant company in the industry in terms of sales? Probably not. In terms of user experience and overall power and elegance? You bet. I'm writing this on a very recent version of X, and though I can't give details, it's really impressive. Fast, stable, beautiful. I think you'll really like it, as will others. Once again, rumors of the demise of Apple…well, you know the rest.
"Marketshare is not always about how many Business Drones or Uncle Joe's use a cheapy PeeCee to email and play solitaire, it includes real work done by professionals who will pay high prices for both hardware and software if it gets their job done FASTER and BETTER "
Amen, brother. Or sister. :-)
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I agree
OSX looks great. I just think Apple is a little late to the modern OS party. Its not that the PC is dead its just that the initial rush to computerize is over. No new OS is going to change the fact that the big surge of people and corportions that wanted PCs already have them and they work, well.