by - February 16th, 2006
John C. Dvorak, the master cage-rattler, is at again, and this time his whip-up-the-Mac-masses angle is that Apple is going to dump Mac OS X, and move to Windows. This is one of his clumsier arguments, but it bears mentioning (and debunking) mainly because there are some folks worried about this very issue. Accordingly, let's shred Mr. Dvorak's arguments.
Mr. Dvorak attributed four basic ideas as presented to him by Yakov Epstein, professor of psychology at Rutgers University, as evidence that Apple was working on such a move. They are (and I quote):
Rubbish, all.
So much for a psych professor's take on the situation, but the interesting thing is that it is psychology, more than any other factor, that negates the idea that Apple would move to Windows. That issue is that Steve Jobs thinks controlling the whole widget is Apple's competitive edge. More importantly, I firmly believe that from his perspective the only OS good enough for his own computing is the one that he's in charge of.
Macs running Windows are running an inelegant OS that Apple can not control. That is entirely antithetical to everything Steve Jobs has talked about for the last 30 years.
Of course, Mr. Jobs has reversed himself before whenever it was necessary for Apple's marketing message (PPC is better than x86. "It's about the music, stupid."), but this is a fundamental issue that goes far deeper than any marketing issue. Steve Jobs has always felt that to make a good computer, you have to control the OS and the hardware. That trumps every other argument.
Professor Epstein probably doesn't understand that, and it's impossible to know what Mr. Dvorak really believes, but this statement from his column is telling:
"From the Mac to the iPod, it's the GUI that makes Apple software distinctive. Apple popularized the modern GUI. Why not specialize in it and leave the grunt work to Microsoft?"
This is so close to the truth, it's easy to read past it and say, "Yeah, that makes sense." It's not quite right, though. Apple's GUI is superior to anyone else's, but what makes the iPod and the Mac so great is that they just work.
Why do they just work? Because Apple controls the software and the hardware.
Rinse. Repeat.
In short, as long as Steve Jobs is CEO of Apple, the company will not move to Windows.
Astute readers will note that I said many times in the past that Apple would never switch to Intel. We all know how that worked out, of course, so why should you trust my analysis of this subject?
In my own defense, I also always said that if Apple did move to Intel, the Mac would remain a proprietary platform, and that Mac OS X for x86 wouldn't run on beige boxes. The reason I have always given for that is that Apple wanted to control the whole widget.
Rinse. Repeat.
I'll close with a congrats to Mr. Dvorak for finding yet another topic with which to push the Mac community's collective button, but there's nothing here to merit anything more than a quick dismissal.