I share the same optimistic dream with you and truly hope it will
come true. However, we have to face the realities and facts.
Rhapsody OS is an enterprise platform, which will be used most in
bussiness sectors, either private industry or Federal Government.
The current statistics tell us Sun Micro is #1, which has more than
30% of workstation market share, then HP-UX, Silicon Graphics, AIX/
RS6000, and DEC/Ultra. If Rhapsody wants to succeed, it has to be
easy to be ported from other similar platforms, and better
performance/cost ratio. Rhapsody uses Object C, but nobody uses that
language, now probably it uses Java, but still, Java is an intepreter
script language, not as popular as c or c++, then what else Rhapsody
can be better than other compatible platforms? The outside world
is very realistic, Rhapsody has to be testified in order to beat other
competitors, which takes at least six months to a year after they
are available in the market. What Apple can do now is to push
Rhapsody on the market on time and have developers verify whether it
is worth porting, testing, and eventually buying it to replace the
existing systems. Rhapsody is a new hope, but Apple cannot totally
count on such market - enterprise. Apple has to continue emphasizing
on consumer market and sells more hardware (either on PowerPC or Intel
chips) cheaper and more powerful to meet the challenges from the other
side of the fence.
Phil |
