Snowballs in Hell
You won't see Mac OS X running on generic machines officially anytime soon - like never! Apple makes its money from the HARDWARE (and before you whine "it's expensive" just check out any PC with the same build quality). Therefore to license the OS like Microsoft (a SOFTWARE company that does not make PC's) did with MS-DOS/Windows and lose the margins they make on the HARDWARE would be utterly, utterly crazy. It ain't gonna happen!
With Snow Leopard Apple is seriously re-writing the main part of the software to run faster and more efficiently on the hardware platforms it's been selling for three years now, and that should be criticised why?. Apple has had both the guts and the skill to transition the Mac three times, with the 68000 to PPC change in the early 90's, the major hand-over from OS9 to OS X in the early noughties through to the Intel chip introduction in 2006. Each time they have done it relatively smoothly, so that users have been able to plan things properly. Windows users (and Microsoft) can only look on in total envy at this situation.
Okay, I'll acknowledge that a smaller user base with a controlled list of hardware specifications makes that dramatically easier than the job Microsoft has had to do with the hardware variations it has to deal with, but who put Microsoft in that position – Answer = Microsoft. If they had controlled the OS software specification and license so that hardware was designed to work with the drivers supplied or specified by MS, rather than the total cluster-fuck of letting Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all write whatever they wanted to, a very large amount of time, and Gazillions of green could have been saved over the years. Large salty tears appear when you think how much that money could have done for much more deserving causes in this world.
As I’m on, the computer security industry is almost completely the bastard love-child of Microsoft. If MS (a slowly advancing, disabilitating disease in other words) had taken security seriously from the word go, especially with sorting out the brain-dead ability of Macros being able to control the eMail client, then the whole generation of early virus-writers would have had a much harder time writing and spreading their variations. Move on a couple of computer generations and those bored teenagers in attics have morphed into the highly sophisticated criminals that constitute a far bigger threat to us individually than Ozzie Bin Laden or even fascist Labour governments can pretend to.
Microsoft has held back real advances over the years with their virtual monopoly. Okay, having three or four major OS’s with equal shares fighting it out for the last twenty-five years may not have been pretty at times, but I’ll bet you anything we’d be in a better situation than now if we’d gone that route.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
