Stickybuffalo.com

You know, it’s time to admit I was wrong. Way, way back, before being hacked, before moving over to wordpress, back when stickybuffalo was a big brown page with a shoutbox, there was some discussion of Apple’s switch from PowerPC processors to Intel processors. As I recall, I was pretty much against the move, seeing it as a bad omen for Apple’s independence. But I was wrong.

It seems obvious now that the switch to Intel was based not only on wanting to increase performance, but also on the idea that Apple computers should be able to run Windows. That’s precisely what worried me initially; I thought Apple had just taken its first tenuous steps down a slippery slope that would end with abandoning the Macintosh OS and transitioning the company to the same space as Dell and Gateway.

Of course, Apple’s market strategists are a lot smarter than I am about this kind of thing, and my hat’s off to them. They knew from the beginning that it wouldn’t be long before people were installing Windows on their Macs, and they openly encouraged it, first by not making any serious attempt to stop DIYers from doing it, and later by releasing Boot Camp. But it wasn’t Mac users installing Windows (because, really, why would any want to?), it was Windows users buying their first Macs, because why not have the ability to use both? And, of course, Apple knew that by continuing legal actions against unauthorized Mac clone makers, they could guarantee that nobody but them could build computers that would run the Mac OS.

So now, Apple makes the only computers that can run both OS X and Windows, and lots and lots of consumers (I know several) are buying Macs and telling themselves that if they don’t like OS X, they can always go back to Windows. Of course, hardly anybody ever gets as far as partitioning their hard drive before they decide to say goodbye to Windows. But really, even this is not Apple’s end goal; after all, consumers make up a pretty small percentage of the computer market, and though they’re loyal, Apple’s never been able to break out of marginality based on increased consumer sales.

Today’s news that a German newspaper publisher is switching all of its 12,000 computers from Windows boxes to Apple computers marks the beginnings of the fruition of Apple’s plan. The linked story notes that Axel Springer isn’t necessarily making the switch from Windows to OS X; it’s couched as a hardware switch. It seems that Axel Springer is planning to continue to use both Windows and OS X . . . at least for now.

It seems to me that it’s just a matter of time until they give up on Windows. If they do, it’ll be huge, since Europe mostly doesn’t care about the Mac OS. And if other companies start following suit, Apple will finally have broken out of its tiny market share ghetto, and Windows will dwindle.