If Apple's new strategy succeeds, the entire computer industry might also shift
Dennis Allen
Why are we focusing on Apple in this issue? It's a fair question to ask in that it's unusual for BYTE to single out one company for our cover story. However, Apple is a major player that has represented the alternative to the original IBM/Intel/Microsoft troika, and the challenges Apple faces and the technologies it is embracing will affect the rest of the computer industry.
Apple has held the image of marching to a different technological drummer. It made plug and play for the Mac a reality years ago. And Apple was the first to bring windowing software with a point-and-click feature to the masses. Apple also set the standard for graphical applications such as desktop publishing and design.
Lately though, a lot of fol
ks have wondered if Apple may have lost its steam. Nearly every advantage that Apple enjoyed with the Mac has been rivaled by Windows-based PCs. Of course, 10 years ago, everyone predicted that other computers would catch up to the Mac. What no one predicted was that Apple would not have continued advancing its technology lead.
To be fair, Apple has made substantive advances with the Mac over the years. However, those advances have been small steps, relatively speaking, while the rest of the computer world was taking giant leaps to catch up to the milestones laid by Apple.
So here we are entering the mid-1990s, and Apple is coming out of what some consider a dead-end street created by the complex architecture of the Motorola 68000 CPUs. They were good for their time--and still are for certain applications--but even Motorola acknowledges that it's time for a change to the PowerPC platform.
Also interesting is that to widen its potential market in the mainstream of computing, Apple must sur
ely give up its proprietary approach to the Mac OS. Is it too late to begin licensing it? Apple would have done well to have licensed the Mac OS years ago, when a good many manufacturers were clamoring to make Mac clones. Now, it's not so clear that other manufacturers are as eager to do so.
That could change, though, and here's why. Apple has committed to moving its design to the PReP (PowerPC Reference Platform) standard. If IBM and Apple succeed in evolving that standard so that any PReP-compliant computer can run the Mac OS, the outlook for Apple begins to look brighter. Because Apple already has a significant following of Mac developers porting their software to run natively on Power Macs, Apple and its operating system could be in the best strategic position for laying claim to the PowerPC systems frontier. That's what makes those secret talks between Apple and IBM so important.
(Let's not even get into the debate about whether PowerPC systems will become a market force. They will. Count o
n it, take it to the bank, and tell them I said so.)
Also consider what Apple is doing with component software. Instead of working alone to bring componentware to fruition, Apple is deeply involved with OpenDoc. OpenDoc is a nonproprietary standard for component software development, and embracing an open technology that will be the core to developing Mac applications marks a departure from the old way of doing things at Apple.
So why is all this so important? Simple: If Apple, one of the biggest computer manufacturers, succeeds, the whole industry might shift. Specifically, that shift would be away from Microsoft Windows. In reality, it would mean that while millions and millions of systems will run Windows, more and more new systems would be delivered with the Mac OS. Conceivably, the PowerPC system you buy in the future might effectively be a Mac with an IBM moniker.
All this makes me recall that a woman at the Newton announcement last year told me she would buy anything Apple made bec
ause it was ``such a neat company.'' Well, emotional charge or not, Apple is entering a new era. Given its pioneering success in shifting platforms (remember the Apple II?), there is good reason to believe that Apple will again succeed. Only time will tell, of course, but as the reporting by Tom R. Halfhill and Tom Thompson in our cover story (see page 50) suggests, it's difficult to find fault with the technology reasoning for which Apple has opted.
Dennis Allen
(
dallen@bix.com
)
Betting on Apple
