On 9/15/05, Kevanf1
Yes, M$ is finally embracing open source, but there is this little thing about having a monopoly. I don't think they _can_ own apple.
If you think Jobs would let Mr. Bill take Apple by force.. you've not paid enough attention to Mr. Ego (jobs).. he would burn the building down himself and open source OS X completely first. ;)
This is MS we are talking about, do you really think they are bothered about such piffling issues as company/product monopolies :-) If they really want Apple they could get it I'm sure. What is MS's stake in Apple these days?
Microsoft sold it's stock in Apple completely 4 years ago. Which is probably a mistake since their $150M investment in 1998 would have given them about a $450M stake today. Microsoft only invested in Apple so they could say " See.. See.. We have a compeditor!! We're not a monopoly! " And this arrangement died a while ago... along with the contract that IE would be the default browser..etc..etc.
I just wonder how companies like yellowdog linux will survive. I tried their YD4 and didn't like it at all. Shame SuSE killed their PPC years ago @ 7.3. They lost a lot of folks. Me included. Now I have all these intel boxes around...
SUSE has restarted the PPC distro for endusers.. it's on www.opensuse.org or so I read a couple days ago. They stopped it when I worked for SUSE because why would anyone with half a brain run Linux on expensive PPC Apple gear when they can just use OS X which is UNIX and is optimized for the hardware. That was SUSE's thinking. But now that's not a consideration. Also, as far as Apples move to Intel.. you just have to look at the Mac news sites to figure this out. IBM didn't have chips to supply across the board from XScale to 64bit chips for laptops like Intel does... this is why they didn't go with AMD. I don't know about you but I love the fact that my Powerbook is under an inch thick.. it's sleek. But they COULD not put even a lowpowered G5 into that thin of a case. It was still too damn hot and power intensive for the designs. Apple designs from the outside --> in when it comes to laptops and whatnot. So they design a look and the engineers make it work and the because IBM had Xbox and PS3 deals.. Apple wasn't a consideration to IBM. There are a lot more reasons but it's not because the PPC isn't a nice cpu.
Nope, just pure speculation on my part. To be honest I really hope MS do not 'acquire' Apple. I'd like to see Apple gain some popularity. Though, not at the sake of Linux of course :-)
Well, 8 out of 10 engineers in my department use Powerbooks and PowerMacs now.. they are all old school UNIX guys.. which makes me understand why Jobs could say that their computer sales have gone up 40% over the last 3 quarters where Dell, HP and IBM have had their sales stay flat. :) It's possible that they are getting more popular. It's also possible that people have more then one machine like I do.. heck.. I've got 3 Linux boxes, 2 FreeBSD machines and a Powerbook. :) Anyway. :) Cheers! -ben -- Atheism is a non-prophet organization.