| What would happen if Leopard's most top, Top Secret, was... | | Date Created: 31 May, 2007, 03:04 AM |
 In a little less than two weeks - what we here call a fortnight - we'll know Leopard's secret sauce, its herbs and spices, the computer equivalent of Coke's secret recipe.
We'll still have to wait until October to install it, and that will give the developers who will get their hands on it two Mondays from now, several months to tweak their own products.
There is an interesting dynamic occurring here, between Apple and its consumers.
Most of us who have been loyal users have learnt to be patient with Apple and OS X software makers, knowing that our Windows brethren will usually get first bite of the cherry when it comes to new software. How often have we seen a webpage say something like "Macintosh version on its way" and it never turns up?
It reminds me of the typography software TypeStyler which has been promising an OS X version of its System 9 software since OS X was available in 2000.
Now Mac users' patience is being tested by the mothership herself, for all manner of plausible reasons. This coming from a company where we've become used to its CEO introducing something new at Macworld and saying "... and it's available NOW."
The delayed-gratification test started last year with the iTV which became the AppleTV several months later. It was announced at MacWorld for delivery a month later. But Apple missed its designated release date, so more patience was required. The iPhone was announced at the same Macworld, but we were asked to wait six months if you were US-based and a year if you were in Asia.
The plausible explanation was the need for FCC approval, but perhaps more likely was the often suggested desire for potential buyers to see their cellphone contracts expire, readying them to jump ship from T-Mobile or Sprint or Verizon (boy, is their management going to look clueless in about a year).
And so the wait is almost over for some. But then we were told that Leopard, slated for a Spring release (northern, not southern), would be delayed in a shades-of-Longhorn extension of time, while its engineers were transferred to the iPhone project with its OS X software. |
 Let's indulge in a little fantasizing for a moment, shall we?
Let's imagine that Steve Jobs wasn't kidding when he said he didn't want to show Leopard's Top Secret stuff at last year's WWDC. He wasn't merely having fun at Microsoft's expense knowing full well how close Vista was coming to the look (but not feel) of OS X. He was quite serious at playing his cards not just close to his vest, but playing a bet-the-house, put-up or shut-up game of poker.
Let's also imagine that a man who can turn Apple around from a basket case to one of the most admired companies (coming #1 innovator in BusinessWeek's estimation three years running), keep OS X-on-Intel secret for years, then adapt Intel's brains and hearts inside his laptops and desktops, really wanted to make the computing world situp and pay attention.
Yeah, yeah... he could try to put Microsoft out to pasture, but the way things are going, he doesn't need to help MS along on this task, it's doing that itself with a little help from Google.
Besides, I think Steve has a soft spot for Bill Gates, despite all the tzures he put him through in the Pirates of Silicon Valley days. A more mellow Steve accepts that Bill still has no taste, and that all the money in the world can't give it to you. Somehow, I think Steve likes that concept.
No, there's another player for whom Steve has some bile left in that delicate digestive system, one Michael Dell who once suggested to Steve he just sell off Apple and be done with it.
What could Steve get his hard-working engineers to work on once the iPhone project is safely baking away in the oven, ready for public scrutiny and tasting, as it is temptingly close to now?
How about the destruction of the PC-making business as we know it, making Dell the Harvard Business School poster boy of how to make and lose a fortune?
How about making Leopard able to run Windows apps without Windows?
What a sweet two-fer that would be! Knock Dell stock through the floor (might as well introduce a beefed-up MacMini with twin video outputs and a souped up GPU to effect the coup de grace), and give a mighty whack to one half of the Microsoft cash cow partnership, Windows OS (pick your flavour, any flavour). The other half, Office, would also get a serious whack around the head with the simultaneous release of '07 versions of iLife and iWork, each getting another KISS application to further round things out.
Keynote 4 would of course become the multimedia presentation tool of choice, integrated with iTunes now that iTunesU is available online, and more and more students and faculty are discovering Keynote's ineffable qualities in eliciting creative and persuasive messaging.
(Extend that fantasy a moment longer and ask yourself what happens when those bright Mac-owning students leave their Ivy League colleges and glam Tech institutes and head into the enterprise setting and are unwilling to take a "No Macs!" answer from ageing IT admins).
There may even be in iWork a truly simple Filemaker Lite, and some kind of funky PDF collator similar to Yep.
Think about it: one emotionally satisfying piece of hardware to run OS X, Linux and Windows apps, even those idiosyncratic niche-y apps which don't have a Mac equivalent. Like Auto repair shops, and bakeries (yawn).
Ah... what a sweet fantasy that would be. No need for Windows OS. Never happen in a million years, would it!
Well, wouldn't it?
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