Cringley has some thoughts on MS and Apple

[alfredo]

At the end he makes a prediction.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060406.html

A Whole New Ball Game:
Blame Dell for Window Vista's Latest Delay, but Blame Microsoft for Apple's Boot Camp
By Robert X. Cringely

Twenty-five years ago, my Thursday nights were mainly spent playing poker with a group that included legendary sportswriter Leonard Koppett from the New York Times and The Sporting News. "Koppy," as everyone called him, was a short, round wide man of infinite good humor who I can't imagine as a baseball player, yet as a baseball writer, he eventually made it to Cooperstown and the Hall of Fame. What made Koppy legendary was his invention of a certain type of baseball story, one that looked at the game from a technical perspective, relying heavily on statistics. Where the stock in trade for baseball writers had always been describing Ruth pointing to the outfield or Mays making a blind catch, Koppy had the ability to say that at the moment Mays was making that catch the game -- and possibly the season -- was already lost, and why. Too few journalists realize the power of this kind of dissection, which can be applied to almost any industry. (Yes, baseball is an industry.) But you have to know what you are talking about. I try to apply it here from time to time and when I come up with the odd story like this one that is based as much on what is unseen as what is seen, well you can blame Koppy, who died in 2003.

This column isn't about baseball. It is about Windows Vista, which Microsoft said a couple weeks ago would be shipping later than expected and would miss the 2006 Christmas season. There has been lots of speculation about exactly why Microsoft had to make such an expensive decision, and five of those reasons were covered right here two weeks ago. But this time I am ready to lay the definitive reason for this particular Windows Vista delay on Dell Computer.


SNIP

Now to Apple and its Boot Camp utility announced this week to allow Intel Mac owners to boot into either OS X 10.4 or Windows XP. Readers (and Wall Street) took this to mean much more than I did, and I like to think I am correct.

Let's take a look and see what this product does -- and doesn't -- do for Apple.

First, we should have seen it coming last week when Apple joined the BAPCo Intel benchmarking group. BAPCo, a consortium of PC hardware and software companies and computer publications, produces standardized benchmark tests, but only for Windows computers. So by joining BAPCo, Apple was saying that it intended to run some version of Windows on Macintosh hardware. Apple doesn't join standards organizations lightly, so Cupertino must expect that the IntelMacs will show quite well against more standard Windows platforms.