...and they should be. I’m trying to remember a tech story of similar magnitude in its implications, and I can’t think of any. Scoble wants to know how people feel about it. To borrow from Douglas Adams, this “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is.”. Scoble has some questions, of which only one is significant to me (#5), and only because it peripherally touches on my biggest question. And I don’t mean that the answers to Scoble’s questions aren’t important. They are. I just feel that the biggest question he left unasked.
Will Apple finally open up Mac OS to run on non-Apple hardware?
To me, there’s no bigger question. If the answer is yes, then we finally have real significant competition on the desktop. If I can buy a copy of Mac OS at Best Buy and install it on my cobbled together from spare parts home PC then I finally have a reason to have Mac stuff in my house. I think the answer is likely to be yes, too. I think it’s the right time for Apple to make that leap. They have enough alternate revenue streams now that they don’t have to depend on Mac hardware, particularly since the sales of the OS are likely to increase dramatically. They have a hugely popular OS at a moment when Microsoft has a very aging OS and no replacement on the visible horizon. Few people outside of Microsoft even have a clue what’s going to be in Longhorn when it’s released or even what year that release is going to happen. This gives Apple a giant window of opportunity to make a big splash.
Assuming the answer to my first question is yes, then my second question is just as big, but it’s for Microsoft, not Apple. You probably think it’s “Will Longhorn be available before Mac OS is widely available for my PC?” That’s a good question too, but not quite as big as the following.
When will there be a Microsoft supported version of the .NET Framework running on Mac OS?
IF we reach the point of having serious competition on the desktop, Microsoft needs to make sure that their .NET platform is available for me, no matter what I’m running. If it’s not, then the .NET vs. Java war is over, and .NET lost. The answer to that question needs to be: the same day Mac OS is available for Intel. For the first time, I’m starting to think that maybe I should know a bit more about Java than I do.
Here’s one more question that I think will have an interesting answer. I don’t think it’s a gigantically huge question like those other two, but it is interesting.
What will the Open Source/Linux community think of this and how will they react as time goes by?
The Open Source community doesn’t like Microsoft. The Open Source community has been relatively friendly with Mac ever since Apple switched to a Unix-based kernel. This announcement has potential to be really bad for Microsoft and really good for Apple. Therefore the Open Source community should be behind this 1000%, right? I’m not so sure. Initially, they will be. And there are good reasons for them to be, even beyond what I’ve just named. However, at some point it will dawn on the Linux folk that they just went from being the 2nd most popular OS for Intel chips, to the 3rd. And even worse, they have become largely irrelevant.
I would consider this bad news, but I think that Apple can be a better competitor to Microsoft than the Linux community ever dreamed of being. And I think that competition on the desktop will be a good thing for end users. Remember when we had real competition for web browsers? We were getting new and better browsers almost on a continuous basis. It’s not out of the question that we could be looking at the same kind of thing on the desktop. Now, that could be exciting. And undoubtedly great for consumers.
UPDATE: Peter Rojas is live-blogging Steve Jobs speech at the WWDC.
UPDATE: Apple Senior Vice President Phill Schiller had this to say: "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac". Unfortunate. And stupid.
UPDATE: Here's the official press release.