Intel's forbidden fruit

Robert Cringely has an interesting take on Apple's recent announcement about using Intel processors. He thinks Apple is going for broke, planning to dethrone Microsoft together with Intel:

This isn't a story about Intel gaining another three percent market share at the expense of IBM, it is about Intel taking back control of the desktop from Microsoft.

Intel is fed up with Microsoft. Microsoft has no innovation that drives what Intel must have, which is a use for more processing power. And when they did have one with the Xbox, they went elsewhere.

So Intel buys Apple and works with their OEMs to get products out in the market. The OEMs would love to be able to offer a higher margin product with better reliability than Microsoft. Intel/Apple enters the market just as Microsoft announces yet another delay in their next generation OS.

He presents a fascinating scenario that makes sense in a twisted kind of way. An OS X version for generic x86 hardware would be a very appealing platform for developers and it's a product that (unlike the never-quite-ready Linux desktop) could conceivably reach a mass market. It sure would be great for competition in the software industry; Cringely may be a tad fixated on Microsoft as the Evil Empire, but if there's one thing Microsoft needs badly, it's competition.

While a nice dream, going up against Microsoft wouldn't be anywhere near as easy as Robert Cringely implies. Making OS X run well on PC hardware (and marketing it) would take lots of time and resources. Apple would obliterate its core (hardware) business and alienate a majority of its current customers in the process. And Intel has neither the motivation nor the guts for such a risky move; any potential benefits for them would be many years away, and they have much more important problems to deal with right now.

11 June, 2005