A couple weeks after Apple unveiled the Mac Mini at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, I called up Andy Hertzfeld, one of the engineers on the original Mac team, to see what he thought about the idea that the Mini could create a new opening for Apple with Windows users. Considering its appeal as a digital-media appliance, and its relative security from malware, wasn't the Mac Mini ideally positioned, I asked him, to take the Windows world by storm?

Herztfeld, who left Apple in 1984, is still a dedicated fan of the company's wares and a keen observer of its fortunes. (He recently published an insanely great memoir, "Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made.") Because he buys just about every piece of hardware the company makes, Hertzfeld had ordered the Mac Mini, and was awaiting delivery of his unit on the day I spoke to him. He planned to use the machine as the hub of his home theater system, and he said he expected many people would use it in similar ways -- as an extra machine, or as a digital media appliance, or just something cool to have around the house. The Mini, he said, was the product of a "confident Apple," a company buoyed by the success of the iPod and unafraid to take the fight to its rivals.

Pleased as he was by the new machine, though, Hertzfeld didn't think it could overturn the Microsoft monopoly. For one thing, he didn't believe that the Mac could really capitalize on its security strengths over Windows. If Apple were ever to take out an ad promoting the Mac's security, "it would only motivate attacks," Hertzfeld pointed out. "Even I have enough of the perverse hacker in me to try something." And certainly as the Mac's market share rose, so would the number of attackers targeting the system.

Hertzfeld believes that the Mac Mini, given the timing and Apple's recent successes, could likely increase the Mac's market share by a bit. If the system did extraordinarily well, if it were successful beyond Apple's wildest dreams, maybe the company would get to a 10 percent market share, he said. But Apple's problem, as Hertzfeld sees it, isn't in getting to 10 percent of the market. The company is smart enough to do so; and if that happened, it would be phenomenal for Apple -- but would it really be a revolution in the PC business? Hertzfeld didn't think so.

The problem with the modern personal computing environment is that, in some fundamental sense, it's a broken business. "There's a poison in the computer industry," Hertzfeld says, "and that is the fact that the common software base is controlled by a predatory software company with a lack of ethics." In case you didn't get the reference, Hertzfeld is talking about Microsoft, which, through Windows, controls the underlying software development base for the PC industry -- essentially, it controls the standards, the keys to empire. "Microsoft is not a good steward of the standards," Hertzfeld says, and if Microsoft is to be beaten, and if a company like Apple is to exert more dominance in the PC world, Microsoft has got to first lose control of the standards. Hertzfeld actually believes that this is occurring; Microsoft is in fact slowly losing its grip on the software development standards, he says. "But I don't think Apple is the driver of that dynamic -- I think the free software movement is pushing that."

Hertzfeld is an ardent believer in the free and open source software movements -- in which software programmers all over the world voluntarily write code that anyone can share, modify or distribute. In the late 1990s, he co-founded Eazel, a company that created a slick file manager app called Nautilus for use on the open-source Linux operating system's GNOME desktop environment. If Apple really wants to change the personal computer business, it will need to do more than release a machine like the Mac Mini, no matter how good it is, Hertzfeld says. It will, instead, need to commit to free software. "Eventually the fix [in the PC business] is for the Windows monopoly to get marginalized by free software, and Apple could make a gulf of difference in that effort" by contributing some of its code, resources, energy and branding power to the free software movement.

Does Hertzfeld have any real hope that Apple, which guards its code just as closely as Microsoft holds Windows, may go the free software route? "I don't predict they will," he says, "but I don't predict they won't, either. They're smart people." What he means is that they may eventually see that it's in their interest to do so.

When discussing the PC business, an important thing to remember is that nothing's quite settled yet. The personal computer is a young product, and the PCs we have today are not the PCs we'll have forever. David Gelernter, the Yale computer scientist, raised parts of this argument in December in an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, published on the occasion of IBM's sale of its personal computer business to Lenovo, a Chinese firm. Gelernter lamented that sale; it indicated, he wrote, that IBM no longer saw potential for the greatness of the PC, and that this "is a shame, even a tragedy -- because the modern PC is in fact a primitive, infuriating nuisance. If the U.S. technology industry actually believes that the PC has grown up and settled down, it is out of touch with reality -- and the consequences could be dangerous to America's economic health."

A conversation with Gelernter is an eye-opening experience. As modern computer users, we go through our lives resigned to mediocrity; this is true of Windows users, but it's even true, he says, of Apple users. The computer can be so much more than the systems we have today. Gelernter wants machines that are "transparent," that are more like appliances than fancy gadgets, machines that put your data, your information, before their own idiosyncrasies. "I don't care about the machine, I care about my documents," he says. It shouldn't matter which computer he goes to in his house, or whether the machine he's on is new or old; he should get access to his life on any machine. And why should anybody spend any time at all "securing" your machine from outside threats, he wonders. Why can't the machine do this for you? "Most people don't want to spend their time to download the latest thing to deal with the latest disaster to strike," he points out. Would we deal with such tediousness for other products we use on a daily basis? "Would anyone ever say, 'Hey, my brakes don't work but that's O.K., I can just download a new anti-lock braking system.'" No; you wouldn't use a car in which the brakes didn't work. Yet we put up with computers all the time in which key functions just stop working, and, routinely, we are OK with that.

The industry desperately needs a new player. Some new company, or new idea, needs to come along to shake the PC business from its foundations. Which company could this be? Well, he knows which firm it won't be -- it won't be Microsoft. "I don't think Microsoft has the freedom to do it," Gelernter says. "If you were the most successful company in the history of mankind, if you were running this moneymaking machine that has done a better job making money than any similar mechanism in history -- if I were that person, I would be far too cautious. Why would I change what I was doing?"

Gelernter believes that IBM or Sun, tech firms that have a long history of research, are two Americans companies that have the best chance of creating a fantastic PC experience. Or, he believes that an unknown Asian company, some firm in Japan or India or China or South Korea that we have not yet heard of, will come along one day and surprise the American PC business in much the same way Japanese auto companies surprised Detroit in the 1970s.

But there's one more American company he thinks has a chance of profoundly altering the way we use computers: Apple Computer. "When we all reluctantly turned off our Macintoshes five years ago, we dived into the PC world, and we haven't looked back," he says. But Apple's recently been building machines that are headed in the right direction, Gelernter says. And God knows they're smart engineers.

"Apple could get a brainstorm," he says.

And Apple's brainstorms, from the Apple II, to the Mac, to the iPod -- and, now, maybe even the Mac Mini -- have a tendency to set the world spinning in directions we'd never thought possible.

Recent Stories