Once I got used to the windows leaping around and contorting themselves on their way to and from the icon dock, the GUI front-end grew on me and didn't send me leaping for the terminal icon every time I wanted to interact with the machine. It's not exactly designed with the die-hard Unix user in mind, but the approach Apple has taken to solving all the classic interface problems is fairly intuitive and it didn't take much playing with the desktop before it at least wasn't getting significantly in my way, which is more than I can say for most GUIs.

Far more important to me were the Mac OS 9 "classic" compatibility features, which gave me the ability to take retail software like Adobe Photoshop for Mac OS 9 and run it out of the box, something I did on the second day I had the system installed. A classic consumer application like Photoshop for the Mac and a Unix standby like emacs running side-by-side was certainly not something I ever expected to see.

It's one of the most exciting aspects of the system: Mac OS X offers the prospect of a "real OS" with "real applications," not just the big, slow, late and far more expensive versions of Windows software most Unix users have sadly become accustomed to.

With multiple millions of Macintosh users to point to, Apple also stands to have little trouble convincing the major software vendors and developers to make versions of their software for OS X as well. We'll have to wait and see how it all plays out, but it looks very promising.

So what does this mean for Microsoft's world software hegemony?

Microsoft achieved its dominant position by cracking the traditional chicken-and-egg problem that faces any manufacturer of a new operating system: How do you simultaneously attract users to an operating system before it has lots of popular applications and convince software developers to create those applications before there is a significant user base?

Microsoft was pretty smart about this and realized that in order to get those initial software developers it had to do several significant things. For one, it had to win over the engineering managers in a position to make "cost decisions" about which software ports to do. This was largely done by designing and implementing a set of APIs -- application programming interfaces -- to deal with almost every immediate application requirement, from data exchange to database connectivity. An API, simply put, is a standard set of code that connects an application to an operating system. Microsoft aggressively pushed its WIN32 API as something that independent developers and vendors could not live without if they wanted to get their software to market quickly.

To convince the engineers, especially those fresh out of school, a whole host of Visual This and Visual That tools were also created and the advantages of Microsoft's Integrated Development Environments [IDEs] were widely touted as the best invention since coffee for programmers.

It didn't really matter so much that some of those APIs were hardly best-of-breed designs or that the IDEs and their associated documentation often fell far short of claims. It was enough to be seen as trying to solve those problems and Microsoft eventually got enough significant applications for Windows that it became an operating system users couldn't live without, thus closing the loop with Microsoft sitting very comfortably in the center and able to launch an aggressive application development program of its own (Microsoft Office, etc.) in order to bring in an even bigger slice of the pie it had, in effect, created.

What does this have to do with Apple? More than you'd think, really. For many years now, Microsoft has been the Goliath everyone complains about, but no one sees any effective way of dealing with. Not to mention the deceased pile of would-be Davids lying at its feet that serve as something of a deterrent to others. The open-source world, on the other hand, has taken the approach that if enough ants go after Goliath with their painful stingers, you don't need a David.

The real truth is somewhere in the middle. As effective as the open-source community has been at giving Microsoft something to worry about, it needs a David to provide both a point of focus for the overall battle and the kind of heavy lifting that simply can't be accomplished by a distributed mass of ants.

This is where I think Apple could play a very significant role -- if it only saw that the various programmers' APIs it has created for components of OS X represent more than just a pretty face and a something for developers and vendors to latch on to. They also represent the first credible beginnings of a challenge to the almost ubiquitous WIN32 API. It is through control of WIN32 that Microsoft has maintained its lock on most of the world's applications software, after all, and thus on the computing industry as a whole.

I believe that the open-source community, for all of its good points, lacks enough leverage to push its own GUIs and integrated desktop environments, such as GNOME or KDE, into the mainstream far enough that we're ever likely to see Adobe Photoshop for KDE or Microsoft Internet Explorer for GNOME (nevermind whether or not you'd want to). The general lack of independent software developer and vendor confidence in either platform leads only to deadlock in the chicken-and-egg scenario described earlier. I don't mean any insult to the KDE or GNOME people by this since they've done a lot of amazing work in a very short period of time. I simply think it's not inaccurate to say that the situation doesn't look too promising for widespread Fortune 500 acceptance of either technology soon.

So, into this situation comes Apple with its relatively large installed user base and some promising new user interface technology. The company has managed to focus a dedicated, full-time group of very smart people long enough to produce some significant results. What comes next depends largely on how bold a game Apple and its technology partners are willing to play.

One game, of course, would be to see how many copies of OS X it can sell to the existing Macintosh user base while striving as aggressively as possible to ensure that new computer users choose Macintosh hardware and software over the latest offerings to come out of the hugely successful (or just plain huge) PC market. Given the tremendous economies of scale and rate of innovation enjoyed by the PC market, not to mention the fact that Microsoft is firmly allied with it, that would be something of a tough battle, to put it mildly.

Another game Apple could play, and this assumes a very bold and aggressively forward-thinking Apple indeed, would be to open-source almost the entirety of OS X. The decision to release something of that magnitude would obviously also not be an easy one for Apple's upper management to swallow. It would first have to see this not as a "sacrifice play," but rather as the first significant move in a much larger fight for a technology and market leadership position. It's certainly easier to measure short-term success by the number of shrink-wrapped software boxes shipped and ultimately settle for a position somewhere behind Microsoft, but that's been the same game everyone has been playing for quite a while and one can only hope that Apple has more ambitious and strategic goals.

That is not to say that having source code available on the Internet implies that the market for prebuilt, tested and supported versions of a product will completely go away -- that's a commonly held fallacy. Other open-source operating system companies have sold hundreds of thousands of copies of software that is also freely available in source form on the Net. A lot of people are still consistently willing to pay for a certain level of assurance that they're getting their software from the experts. Who would know OS X better than Apple?

More importantly, openness would give Apple access to the open-source community of developers. It would even give the company entree into the PC world -- there's an army of volunteers doing the kinds of device driver and hardware support work that Apple would have a hard time trying to do all by itself. Having a credible GUI alternative for open-source operating systems might also, finally, move the open-source world past trying to reinvent the desktop wheel and on to writing the kinds of developer productivity software and "generally useful stuff" that a large user base with access to source code can provide in almost unending quantity.

To be certain, there will exist a cadre of OS X developers doing nifty Aqua applications whether the sources are released or not, but that group won't include so many of the talented BSD and Linux people who are backing other technology simply because it's free, both ideologically and monetarily, and the importance of that community should never be underestimated.

Through all of this, Apple would still be at the center of the resulting cyclone since it would have so much "moral authority" over the APIs and would be at the center of so much ongoing innovation that any erstwhile competitor could only ignore Apple at its own peril. It just simply wouldn't make any sense to leap off the biggest bandwagon in town. Apple would be able to easily leverage its center position in any number of ways by having some of the best people and always enough lead-time on emerging market opportunities to grab some of the best for itself. Apple would also have plenty of room for a Microsoft-like transition to writing higher margin application suites (which would NOT be free) while also continuing to produce, unlike Microsoft, elegant new hardware to fill the needs of OS X's ever-growing army of users.

Ah well, a BSD developer can always dream, can't he?

Recent Stories