Wednesday, January 10, 2007

I've hit the century, My 100th Post - it's a theory about a sea change in the computer industry

Ok. I've had time to think since the unveiling of the iPhone. In my opinion, the iPhone will be to the cell phone what the iPod was to the mp3 player. These things are gunna sell like chocolate bars at a fat camp. It doesn't take a genius to work that out.

What will Apple do on the back of this? They own the portable music industry. The will own the portable phone industry. The one place they still don't own is the Personal Computer industry. They did once. The Apple II was the computer industry. The original Mac popularised the GUI interface. And then a usurper called Microsoft came and took it all away (along with IBM I guess).

Can Apple turn this around? I think on the back of the iPhone and iPod popularity, people will look at Mac's as a viable alternative to Windows, especially now that you can run Windows apps natively on OSX.

The one thing holding them back is the price of the hardware. Sure cool has a price, but not that much. If Apple allowed OSX run on generic X86 hardware. Well that would just rock. I really and honestly think if they did that they could make huge inroads into the MS monopoly. The question is: Do they want to?

I guess they think of themselves as a hardware company rather than a software company. Their history is creating computer hardware and software, and it would be hard for them to let go, but please Steve, do it. You could once and for all get one back on your old nemesis.

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