DOS Next?*

Continued from 'The Virtualization Alternative'….

Boot Camp, I'll remind you again, is beta software. And reflective of this fact, I can't help but be amused by reports that the HFS or HFS+ partition-resizing maneuver Disk Utilities undertakes prior to creating the FAT32 or NTFS partition sometimes corrupts the OS X image, leaving the Macs only able to boot Windows. But those bugs will sooner or later get ironed out. Parallels Workstation, too, is beta software, and I presume its performance and functional compatibility issues, along with its bugs, will also lessen with time (in partnership, for example, with graphics chip providers like ATI and Nvidia, following in AMD and Intel's virtualization-hooks-in-silicon footsteps).

Apple has announced that Boot Camp will come standard with its next OS X release, OS 10.5, which the company will preview at the normally-June, but this-year-August, Worldwide Developers Conference. Cyberspace has been abuzz with speculation as to what form this Windows-on-Mac support will take. Will Apple:
1) Simply bug-squash and polish the one-or-the-other-O/S approach which the current version of Boot Camp implements?
2) Exploit the virtualization hooks built into Intel's CPUs to, as Parallels Workstation does today, support running Windows on top of OS 10.5? Or
3) Leveraging its cross-licensing agreements with Microsoft, build Windows' APIs directly into OS 10.5 (as IBM's OS/2 did), thereby enabling Mac users to directly run Windows apps on OS X?

As intriguing as option 3 sounds, I think it's a stretch. Option 2, I believe, is also over-enthusiastic. Here's why:
1) Apple's O/S developers aren't, in spite of what Mac fanatics might believe, coding gods. OS X, like Windows, regularly gets patched to fix bugs and potential exploits. Apple's application developers are also human. OS 10.4 wasn't a quantum-leap jump beyond OS 10.3, and I suspect the OS 10.4-to-5 transition will follow a similar baby-step approach, the latest iteration of a pattern that began with the OS 10.0-to-1 evolution.
2) Why subject a next-generation operating system to schedule and bug risk when you don't need to? Offer Boot Camp as it now is, and folks who want virtualization can spend $50 (or less) on Parallels Workstation or a competitive program. Save built-in virtualization for OS 10.6, when CPUs will be faster, RAM and HDDs will be cheaper, and the implementation will therefore be more robust.
3) By enabling users to run Windows (and/or Windows apps) on top of OS X, Apple potentially harms both its own applications and those of its third-party partners. Due to functional and performance issues with virtualization, I don't think the games-on-OS X developers will be hurt much by virtualization, at least for a while. But less performance-critical applications running on a virtualized Windows could provide serious competition to native OS X alternatives. And I doubt Steve Jobs wants to give his current customer base any chance to taste Microsoft's seductive embrace-and-extend software strategy.
4) Bottom line: everything Apple does is first and foremost about selling hardware. This might be easy to forget sometimes, when you hear about the astronomical number of downloads-to-date from the iTunes Store, or overhear (or engage in) the never-ending OS X vs Windows debates spurred on by the occasional sarcastic Redmond jab from Steve Jobs. But the fact that Apple won't disclose its iTunes Store profits suggests that those profits are razor-slim (if indeed they exist at all); during a recent quarterly earnings teleconference, Apple executives would only comment that 'the iTunes Store is above break even' and that 'selling songs and movies is helping us to sell iPods'. And regarding software, Apple and Microsoft need each other at least as much as they compete against each other, maybe more. Boot Camp sells more copies of Windows. Virtualization sells more copies of Windows. Apple's true competition isn't Microsoft. It's trend-conscious consumers that right now are buying high-end desktop and laptop systems from Dell, Lenova, Sony, and other PC vendors (i.e. the iMac and PowerBook), and budget systems from a plethora of PC suppliers (i.e. the Mac mini). Keep this factoid in mind; if Apple increases its computer market share by only 4 percentage points, it roughly doubles its market share.

Continued with 'ENDIF'….

*'DOS Next?' sounds like 'What's Next?'. Get it? Sigh….