Brennan’s Blog

While Apple and Microsoft continue to play nice for the public, I know they are still fiercely competing to capture as much as the market as possible. And I do not think giving the name Boot Camp to their dual booting software was any coincidence. Apple is in the early stages of going to war with Microsoft. And the subtle jab through the naming of this product reminds me of when IBM released Eclipse years ago to usurp control of the Java market from Sun. Now Eclipse is the most widely used Java development tool. These subtle names show their lasting intensions.

Last year Chris Siebold predicted that the Apple share of the laptop market would spike, and so it did to 12% of the market. A combination of many factors contributed to this dramatic growth, including a switch to Intel chips, ongoing security headaches of the Windows operating system and a convenient feature to boot back into Windows to use that application which still only runs in Windows. I think it is great to see Apple making proper headway to give Microsoft some real competition. Afterall, it was not until Firefox had gained up to 10% of the browser market that Microsoft decided to reform their team for Internet Explorer and finally push out a new release. Sometimes the 800lb gorilla needs a push.

Coming in Janurary we will see the new Vista release. All indications from reviews of the release candidate show some progress over the early beta releases which many felt were disappointing. Microsoft knows they have to nail this release. But it seems very likely that despite all of the work put into making Vista more secure than WinXP, they are essentially breaking the system they are trying to protect. All of the added roadblocks to stop viruses and spyware also have the undesired effect of also annoying the user.

Microsoft must realize that while the operating system is central to their business, it is something the users do not want to have in their way at every step. When I want to unzip a file I do not want a dialog box appearing to ask me if it is ok just to see the context menu. After I installed Internet Explorer 7, when I right-clicked on a file on a network share Windows Explorer prompted me to check if I was sure I wanted to do that. That is annoying, and it does not appear that I can turn it off. At that point Windows starts to feel like shareware.

The old joke about trying to uninstall a virus from Windows is that Windows is the virus. At times that is so true. When your system slows down or some behavior changes for no apparent reason you can often trace it back to something internally that is causing the problem. Either a Windows Service is running away with your processor and disk performance or some setting was inexplicably changed, perhaps due to an installation of a security update. Without any troubles related to a genuine virus, these problems remain. And that is no joke.

I predict that Apple is again poised to take another large grab of the market. And this time next year the computer market will be very different.