Posted on 04/12/2008 2:04:10 AM PDT by Swordmaker
A recent upgrade to the Mac operating system moves Apple closer to challenging Microsoft for overall computing dominance, even in the corporate market
The 20-year death grip that Microsoft has held on the core of computing is finally weakening—pried loose with just two fingers. With one finger you press "Control" and with the other you press "right arrow." Instantly you switch from a Macintosh operating system (OS) to a Microsoft Windows OS. Then, with another two-finger press, you switch back again. So as you edit family pictures, you might use Mac's iPhoto. And when you want to access your corporate e-mail, you can switch back instantly to Microsoft Exchange.
This easy toggling on an Apple computer, enabled by a feature called Spaces, was but an interesting side note to last fall's upgrade of the Mac OS. But coupled with other recent developments, the stars are aligning in a very intriguing pattern. Apple's (AAPL) recent release of a tool kit for programmers to write applications for the iPhone will be followed by the June launch of iPhone 2.0, a software upgrade geared toward business users.
Taken together, these seemingly unrelated moves are taking the outline of a full-fledged strategy. Windows users, in the very near future, will be free to switch to Apple computers and mobile devices, drawn by a widening array of Mac software, without suffering the pain of giving up critical Windows-based applications right away. The easy virtualization of two radically different operating systems on a single desktop paves a classic migration path. Business users will be tempted. Apple is positioning itself to challenge Microsoft for overall computing dominance—even in the corporate realm.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessweek.com ...
For a desktop environment, VMWare Workstation already does this, although it's a commercial product. And you can download VMWare Server for Linux for free.
Mark
I think most people running Parallels or VMWAre or BootCamp are gamers or like me, someone with a weird application that is not supported in OS X.
Parallels and/or VMware are used by people that must access one or more of the dozens of websites and web applications that requires IE and other Mac technologies.
“Parallels and/or VMware are used by people that must access one or more of the dozens of websites and web applications that requires IE and other Mac technologies.”
Parallels and/or VMware are used by people that must access one or more of the dozens of websites and web applications that requires IE and other Windows/browser technologies.
How about YOU do the same. I never said you wrote those things. I said:
To this day you see reports that "Microsoft bought 10% of Apple" and that "Bill Gates owns Apple" and that "Apple was about to declare bankruptcy when MS saved them."
Microsoft did indeed transfer to Apple a bunch of money but it was in exchange for Apple dropping a lawsuit... which I have proved conclusively. I posted just a small portion of the evidence to establish what actually happened. . . and it is NOT what you believe it was. The claims that Microsoft did it to "bail Apple out" or "that MS saved Apple" is just as much of a myth as those are. Microsoft blinked. Accept it.
They didn't sell Office to 8 million Mac users... from my experience, they may have had a 25% market penetration on Mac and many of those were using the previous version of Office. Remember, Apple was including a copy of ClarisWorks with every Performa Mac they sold.
Their crappy browser was most often replaced with Netscape as soon as the new buyers could switch... all you had to do was run Netscape once and it asked if you wanted to make it your default browser. Most did. IE was considered a joke by most Mac users. As soon as the 5 year agreement expired, Microsoft dropped support for IE on Mac... and Apple replaced it with Safari.
Microsoft had to pay a yearly license for the software patents that Apple owned. Apple got to use the Microsoft patents in perpetuity for nothing.
There was no 10 - 1 profit on the deal... The stock sale was a way for MS to have a way to recover its initial payment to Apple... that's why it was called a negotiation... an exchange of plusses for both sides... but Apple got the lion's share of plusses.
MS didn’t blink, MS turned a profit on the settlement, you yourself admitted that. That’s not blinking.
According to MS at the time the settlement occurred they had 8 million Office for Mac users:
http://www.news.com/MS-to-invest-150-million-in-Apple/2100-1001_3-202143.html
“More than 8 million customers use Microsoft Office for the Macintosh, making it “the single largest revenue Mac application,” Maffei said.”
Lots of people never bothered to replace the default browser, that’s a large part of why MS won the browser war. Most users aren’t savvy enough for that, or just don’t care, they use what’s on the computer and learn to be happy with it.
Sorry but you admitted they sold the stock at a profit, add the revenue from Office and you’re talking a minimum ROI of 10X. Not something that any sane person would consider being taken to the cleaners.
You’re dancing, Discostu. MS had already sold those 8,000,000 copies of Office...those were the older versions already in the market... remember Office 97 had NOT BEEN RELEASED.
Mac users were really pissed off to have IE made the default browser. Many if not most switched back to their familiar Netscape that was in the same “
Internet Applications” folder with Internet Explorer. You are not now and were not a Mac user in 1997 but you claim to know what Mac users did back then. Switching back to Netscape was as easy as double clicking on the familiar Netscape icon next to IE’s icon.
You say “I admitted” that MS sold the stock for a profit as though I were denying it. I have not. It’s irrelevant as to why the stock was purchased in the first place.
You have reduced yourself to ad hominem attacks in implying I am insane. Why not admit the facts and stop the dancing around them.
I’m not dancing at all, you’re ignoring the point. They were going to pull Office for Mac, then thanks to the agreement they didn’t, that meant they had another version to sell to those 8 million customers. Office 98, Office 2001 and Office for OSX all came out during the window of the agreement, my numbers only assumed they sold one of those three (on average) to each of those 8 million customers or their replacements.
Lots of people were pissed about IE being the default browser, Mac people were just behind the curve on that. Didn’t stop IE from winning the browser war.
What you’re now denying is that MS made tons of money on the deal. You tried to say they were taken to the cleaners, but you yourself said they sold the stock at a profit, even if that’s ALL the profit they made on the deal (which it isn’t) that would mean they weren’t taken to the cleaners.
I’m not implying you’re insane, I’m saying you’re living in denial. It bothers you that MS didn’t lose on the deal, it’s important to you that they were taken to the cleaners, but the facts are they made at least 10 to 1 on the deal, the facts are they were not taken to the cleaners, the facts are you’re doing EXACTLY what you accuse everybody who ever says anything bad about Macs of doing: spreading FUD.
It's not hard to run 50 users on a modern high-speed 1U these days, and with Windows the licenses may end up costing you a large percentage of your total purchase price.
If OS X can provide directory and authentication services that are worth that, and can get the application developers to support that platform, they'll be worth considering.
Directory services are based on OpenLDAP with Kerberos (and not a Microsoft screwed-up version either). Actually, most of the services are standard UNIX or based on them. As far as development on the platform, there's Java, Ruby on Rails, PHP, Perl, Python, etc. without having to port anything, in addition to programming directly for the Mac in C, C++, etc.
All well and good. But I have to manage what I've got, and that's going to depend on what the developers actually produce, not just what's possible. You can bitch about how screwed up AD is all day long. Show me the Open Source 'Exchange killer' that management will buy and be willing to retrain everyone on, or replace ments for the list of vertical market apps we've got that are only supported on Windows platforms.
Mark
It doesn't bother me at all. I told you Microsoft sold the stock for a profit. I never denied they sold Office 97 to Mac users (just not in the numbers you think). You started this by repeating the myth that Microsoft bailed Apple out and saved them as a company. I have shown you that the myth is not true. Microsoft would never have done it had they not been rightly sued by Apple and losing the case.
What does bother me is the continued spreading of this FUD, this lie, when the actual facts are easily found... contemporary documents, the original legal contracts themselves, and examining WHO got what out of the deal, show easily that there was no "bail out" of a beleaguered Apple but instead a negotiated settlement in which both parties gained something. When you publish it once again, it shows that it is people like you, Discostu, who occupy the "Reality Distortion Field." I've posted documentary evidence of what actually happened... you offer one news article quoting MS's spin, and your unsupported opinion. You want to IGNORE things like:
David Boies, attorney for the DoJ, noted that John Warden, for Microsoft, had omitted to quote part of a handwritten note by Fred Anderson, Apple's CFO, in which Anderson wrote that "the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million. . . . The confirmation of the payment appears to be the first hard news that Microsoft had been forced to back down in Apple's case against Microsoft.
Note that it says NOTHING about Apple having to pay anything.
The MS "10 - 15 times profits" you impute to the settlement are more of your dancing... they would mostly have been made anyway. Apple was not going to go under... it had already turned the corner and was showing a profit after posting a loss in one year only: 1996. Macs were still being sold. Mac users would be buying software. The market for Office '97 for Mac would still be there regardless of the settlement. MS could sell their Office suite and make back their development costs and make a profit. The only profits that may be legitimately associated with the purchase of the stock would be those from the sale of the stock. EVERYTHING else would have been there regardless of the purchase.
Ask yourself this: "Why would Microsoft cancel distribution of Mac Office '97 for Mac when it was already fully developed, published, boxed and ready to be sold to those 8 million potential customers and when it represented such a large profit center with a potential return of $1.2 billion dollars?" That's cutting off their nose to spite their face unless they had a good reason to threaten to do it. They did it to pressure Apple into dropping the lawsuit that they knew they would lose... and lose bigger than that potential profit. All they had to do to make that potential $1.2 billion was to release the product they were withholding to pressure Apple into dropping the lawsuit. Apple refused and instead offered a compromise... the settlement.
The fact is that MS would never have invested $150,000,000 in Apple unless they were forced to... which they were by the terms of the lawsuit settlement. READ the three agreements... not the face saving spin Microsoft put on them. Why did they agree to a "cross licensing agreement" which requires Microsoft to PAY yearly royalties to Apple for the license for Apple's software patents MS had been violating and agree to grant to Apple, free of royalties, a perpetual, for the life of the patents, license for those MS patents that Apple was interested in that were not even part of the lawsuit? Why did they give Apple a five year commitment to continue producing and DEVELOPING MS Office for Mac?
What did Apple give up in return for all of these payments and continuation of a product that Apple would make no money from? A stock certificate that probably cost them about $5 to print.
Who won?
When a law suit is settled out of court, you can bet that the party who PAYS is the party who would be losing if the case went to trial.
Then it is amazingly well documented, factual FUD.
Par of the problem was IBM's dogmatic clinging to token ring, and thier refusal to support etherenet.
Well, I was kind of in the thick of this as a bit of an outsider. I was doing PC assembler and a lot of VAX, Unix and database work.
One problem IBM had was all the PCs came with windows anyhow. Users had windows at home (or DOS) and OS/2 was “different” and had a cost.
I also saw a ton of IBM types seeing OS/2 EE as a huge threat on the server side. The majority of IBM was trying to convince people that if you took your data and operations off the mainframe, “you were asking for trouble.”
I’m trying to remember what apps were on OS/2. I’m recalling not many. I’m not sure any of what became MS-Office or even WordPerfect were on OS/2.
As a directory server, OS X can manage a mixed Mac, Windows and UNIX environment. As an application server, it can do pretty much anything, the only problem being migration. And if you have that one Windows server app for which there is no Mac equivalent and it was written specifically for Windows (not a cross-platform Java/Ruby, etc., app), you can either run it on a Windows box in the network or virtualize it within one of the OS X servers.
Then you can watch your TCO go down. For example, Apple has the ability to remote to systems, do remote unattended application installs and updates, share screens with the ability to hide actions from the user, do remote encrypted large file copying, list systems according to almost any hardware or software criteria, get application usage and user reports, and monitor with hardware, software and inventory reports. You can also script actions, create workflows and use Spotlight to search the remote systems.
You can do all that in the Microsoft world (except the Spotlight search) with a bunch of different utilities. Some of those are free or included, and some cost thousands plus client licenses. With Apple it's called Remote Desktop, $1,000 for unlimited clients.
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