no. because the last x-box hemmorhaged dinero. this one looks to do the same. i think microsoft's gearing up to fight google, and kill off a few competitors along the way -- a college roommate of mine was hired (out of Chapel Hill, no less) to kill SAS (traitor!).


caveat: i don't know anything about video games and i likes to keep it that way. hence, all i know about the x-box is what i hear oon marketplace.

Don't think so much, five.

Apple's moving to x86 as a survival tactic, not for world domination. They kept getting burned by Moforola, and the IBM thing wasn't working out terribly well either, while Intel keeps cranking out solid, fast silicon -- and there's a semi-competitive market, not one supplier.

But Apple could never weasel its way in between the Microsoft-Intel relationship. It's big motherfucking bucks important to both companies.

Given past history I have no doubt that Apple will be ahead of the curve for even Intel (they were always ahead of the hardware chain), but I've used Linux on Wintel plenty and there's no stunning advantage. They'll definitely be competitive but there's no way they're blowing M-So out of the water with this strategy.

Heh, no.

The place I just started working for is migrating a bunch of key systems from Linux to Microsoft Server 2003. Granted, they've always been a primarily NT/2K/Server shop, but they've moved a bunch of critical stuff off of Linux to 2003.

Why? In a word, homogeneity.

Linux may be faster, tighter, and more diverse, but there's a sweet spot for linux, and it tends to be in either the low-end "free as in beer" startup and/or DIY phase or in the high end really huge iron we-can-afford-to-hire-an-army-of-bearded-nerds phase.

Meanwhile Microsoft's "sweet spot" ranges from the desktop all the way up to fairly large corporate projects. See also: Exchange server, Office2000/XP, Outlook, and all the other familiar banes of the mainstream corporate world.

Microsoft's products are fairly well documented. There's an extensive training and support base. There's familiarity and the ideological comfort of knowing that there's a multibillion to trillion dollar company standing behind it's products, or at least appearing to.

The latest statistics show that Linux is actually losing a bit of ground - but in a sense it's more like it is settling into well-suited niche applications rather than being thrown about willy-nilly just to do something, anything, to get away from Microsoft. And frankly, Microsoft has responded to this "fuck Microsoft!" rallying cry quite well.

Not necassarily satisfactorily, mind, but they've leveraged and wangled and what have you to maintain market share and keep people from jumping ship.

On to the X-Box: The X-Box is a toy. It'll always be a toy. As it stands right now the X-box 360 is an expensive, crappy toy. What the X-Box and X-Box 360 has more than anything is the X-Box Live service, with well integrated multiplayer voice and game services.

One of the exciting things about the X-Box when the information about it first started hitting the net was how much it was like a WinTel desktop PC. "Hey, finally, a hackable, cheap and powerful PC/Game/Hybrid/Net Appliance thingy!" the geeks rallied. Well, except for the fact that by the time the X-Box actually came out you could build a better system for a bit less, or not much more. And have a real computer, besides.

Personally I'm not even interested in one - but I'm not their target market. We just recently got a Gamecube in this house, and I was more than content replaying key Nintendo64 games over and over. I'm personally interested in waiting for the Nintendo Revolution. And I'm digging Nintendo's strategy - well designed systems and hardware, excellent games and game designs. I'm frankly surprised there hasn't been some kind of Apple-Nintendo collaborations, as the philosophies are similar.

On to Apple and OS X:

They still have less than a 10% desktop market share. What's the (dedicated) server share for OS X? I'd make an educated guess and say it's less than 1%. What about the Apple X-Serve? Even less? Why would anyone run OS X as a server when they could just run NetBSD/OpenBSD/FreeBSD? Or Linux?

One of the (marketing) snagging points I can see for OS X on x86 is that they'll finally have to admit that their hardware really isn't all that special - in fact compared to the open market of PC hardware, it's lagging terribly - and that's been a persistent problem for Apple. In reality, these days they're an OS and software company, not a hardware company. The sell an experience, not advanced hardware. Not for a dozen years have they been anything but a software and "experience/style" company, despite all indications otherwise.

I've always been vastly underwhelmed with the real-world performance of even the newer dual G5 desktop machines with maxed out ram and high performance 3rd party drive interfaces, especially compared to even a bloated desktop system like KDE w/ Linux on x86 hardware. Hell, running KDE/Knoppix live from the CD feels faster than a lot real-world dual G5 machines. On my frickin' single-CPU 700MhZ PentiumIII Slot A with 384 megs of RAM, no less. On a shitty 32 meg video card. With crap for a front side bus and crap for hard drive interfaces.

Now, I've heard first hand accounts of OS X on x86, and yeah, it's supposed to be slicker than dolphin snot.

But that's not going to do Apple any good unless they open up OS X for unsecured machines. Microsoft doesn't sell systems - at least not until recently with the niche-market X-Box. An educated guess puts 90-99% of Microsoft's revenue from software licenses and support of said software alone. Microsoft sells software.

For Apple to compete with Windows they'll need to sell their OS. They need to open it up, ramp up the hardware support and tech support and let Joe Six-Pack user go buy a copy for tech-savvy nephew Timmy to install on his uncle's old Dell.

And since Apple is all about "quality of experience" this scares the shit out of them. The mere thought of opening up the experience to any random chunk of unknown hardware out there in the wild puts them into total brown-trousers territory. Because that's frankly the only reason they've been able to keep a very marginal edge in the "quality of experience" department - a very limited system hardware base.

And this philosophy of control is reflected in Steve Jobs, and it has been reflected in his methods, conflicts, practices and philosophies since the dawn of Apple.

And this is why Microsoft does so well, and will continue to do well. They support an unbelievable amount of hardware. And an unbelievable amount of hardware supports Windows.

However, the primary problem with Windows as a desktop is a distinct (or perhaps even marginally lesser, depending on the skill of the user) lack of quality of experience.

One reason why the quality of experience is degraded is just what I mentioned above: A vast, incomprehensible hardware support base. It's one of the things that makes Windows so good and so terrible at the same time.

The other reason is security issues with IE and Windows itself. It's very "openness" - as far as the user end is concerned - and it's vast install base makes it a target for spyware, worms, trojans, viruses and other malware. Remove the malware and increase security and you've removed about 70-90% of the "problems" with modern Windows. Increase the ease of hardware support and you're approaching a really good, solid thing in the 90-99% satisfaction ratings range - for your average user.

So, no. Unless Apple/Jobs pulls a fast one and opens up OS X as a non-hardware-centric OS and allows it to be purchased outright for installation on unsecured hardware, there's no way they'll do anything other than hang on.

They could possibly just make their hardware really cheap - which is what the iMac, eMac and Mini Mac are supposed to do- but there's a whole lot of competition out there already. Bloodthirsty, inhauman, cut-throat competition. They can't realistically compete there. Because they're value-added hardware configurators - again, they don't actually make true hardware. They just package it nicely and make it play nicely together. They have to mark up their hardware. And that marked-up hardware supports and suppresses the prices of their software.

Give me an up to date copy of OS X for $200 bucks or less that I can install on any x86 machine and we'll talk. Until then Apple will always be struggling and playing catch up, because they keep (stupidly) insisting they can have their cake and eat it, too.

Which, frankly, is a shame and tragedy.

i totally stopped reading that three grphs in when i realized you were a big time geek. sometime around the 'front side bus,' i think.
hah! geek!
don't take my job.

I thought this was about Pinky and the Brain.

well, fff, i wish you were right.

Yow, loquacious once again lives up to his moniker. Well said.

Well, I guess late-night falling-asleep ideas aren't all that valuable after all.

Apple has absolute crap on the enterprise level. take a hard look at what Windows Server 2003 can do and it's pretty bloody amazing. that's really what's keeping them in the business world.. with a relatively modern Active Directory network, I can set group policies and control a ton of settings on your computer, push software down (and restrict it based on what kind of machine you have), scan for patchlevels, etc. etc. etc. and that's just with MS's tools - there's a huge ecosystem of third-party tools to work with AD and all that stuff too. Apple doesn't come near what MS offers. the Xserve is more like a pre-configured LAMP box; it does have some of the authentication services that AD provides, but nowhere near the managability.

on the home front, yeah, OS X all the way - and not on Dells, but on Macs, which really TBH aren't that much more than equivilant dells anymore - but on the enterprise, a properly managed and maintained active directory network rocks. it honestly makes me sad; I love Apple's products and feel they do things the Right Way(tm) more than, say, most Linux distros or Microsoft, but there's just so much manageability and all built into active directory that it's hard to say no to. OS X is really in the NT 4 days as far as that stuff goes - sure, you can log in and get a home directory but everyone else has moved on. if it matured really fast and got all sorts of network management and control features it'd be awesome. also, howdy to all you folks!