Microsoft and the Mac—Sleepless in Seattle

Microsoft (hereinafter referred to as Little Blue) is clearly aware that Apple is now a threat to its hegemony. Stave Ballmer must have stopped at Starbucks and noticed the number of Apple laptops in use. (Apple's share of the US laptop market has doubled to 12% in a year). Or maybe he's been watching the “I'm a PC and I'm a Mac” ads that are running on US TV.

So here's what Little Blue is doing:

1. Vista imitates some of the “cool” interface features of OS X. (The problem here for Little Blue is that it doesn't know the features of OS X that it will actually have to compete with. It will find out in August, which is too late for Vista).
2. Little Blue is going to launch its own version of the iPod in November. Remember that Little Blue has been taking evening courses in device design in order to deliver an XBox with teen appeal. The iPod-wannabe will be called Zune (to rhyme with iTune) and will not suffer from Neanderthal design influences. (Little Blue's problem here is that iPod users have invested their music collections—bought, uploaded and stolen—in Apple's proprietary file formats. People really value their gigabytes of stolen music. Why change?)
3. Little Blue is urging PC manufacturers to, er, design PCs differently (according to Business Week). Here's what it is recommending; colours—black and translucent white, PC cases with “accelerated curves”. Astonishingly original. (Little Blue's problem here is that these design ideas are not astonishingly original).

Little Blue has spent too long imitating the now defunct IBM strategy; wait for someone else to validate the market and then move in to take it. Nowadays the first mover has greater momentum. You cannot necessarily close the gap with dollars and FUD.

Little Blue needs to do what Big Blue did; drop the monopolistic approach and get a new business model. That was how IBM pulled off its Phoenix-from-the-flames act.

In August, at the Apple developer's conference, Steve Jobs will make some announcements. There are two things he will announce for sure:

1. A new top of the range Intel Apple to replace the current G5.
2. OS X, Leopard. This will try to be a Vista-killer, aimed at making Vista look like yesterday's OS

He may also announce a new iPod, because one is due. It would keep the financial analysts happy. There's a rumour, probably true, that Apple will also announce a video rental service (based on movie download with attached DRM) in concert with an iPod announcement.

The key announcement ought to be Leopard. That's where Apple has its biggest opportunity.

Note 1: I've been suggesting since January that Apple will support virtualization and thus Leopard will probably run “Windows in a box”. Recent news that Apple stores will sell the Parallels virtualization product through its Apple stores suggests that I'm wrong. Parallels has that market to itself for the moment.

Note 2: The last call that the Panther version of OS X makes as it closes down is die_you_gravy_sucking_pigdog() (from BSD's shutdown.c module). That's no way to talk to an iMac.

YouOS

Ever fancied having an OS within a browser, so that there was a desktop waiting for you in every cybercafe or airport lounge in the world? If so, go to www.youos.com and grab yourself a free account. If you can't be bothered to do that, just imagine a web page with a wallpaper background and a few icons you can click on, plus a drop down menu at the top left for icon haters.

Does this idea have legs? I'm not sure. It depends on how it evolves. It would be a good deal more impressive than it currently is, if it ran as the browser itself, rather than from within a window in the browser. The YouOS desktop has a (primitive) browser of its own and if you want to access www.writely.com you can put that url in the browser-within-a-browser and, at your request, it will open up a new tab in FireFox that displays Writely.com. That's fine, but it feels wrong.

The idea doesn't have legs.

HP and Mercury

Credible rumours that HP had Mercurial intentions turned out to be true. The Mercury acquisition is good for HP for 3 reasons:

1. The software portfolios are complementary.
2. The combined revenue (about $2 billion) turns HP into a serious system management/infrastructure software player (if there was any doubt—and I never had any).
3. HP now has a SOA registry and other additional SOA assets.