I am seeing a *lot* of false assumptions and claims on this board. The strategy is a lot clearer now than it has been in 3 years, so it is ironic that there is now confusion.
Well, I think this is one time that having worked for Apple might not allow you to see things as a
layperson. :) Really, I am confused not so much at the strategy, but by the constant changing of
strategies. I can't keep things straight anymore. From what I gather from you, Rhapsody is Mac OS
10. Does this mean Mac OS 10 will run on Intel??? That is a major thing, even bigger than just
Rhapsody on Intel. Can you clarify this? Sorry if I am too confused for you, but I would bet that I am
not the only one who has more questions than answers after Jobs speech. FWIW, I think it was
probably best to just stick to the one OS approach. Apple is having enough of a hard time keeping
developers for the Mac OS.
This is valid. Given Apple's software strategy for the last 3 years, anyone would be confused. In fact, given how unrealistic previous strategies were, your confusion should be directly related to how much of Apple's previous "software directions" you bought into. Re: Copland? QD GX? OpenDoc?
The problem with Rhapsody is that software companies have invested millions of $$$ and hours into creating codebases for the Mac apps you know and love. They are not happy about a marketing and software strategy that would make that all "legacy code" overnight. They have no interest in a business model that involves dozens of man-years of effort, just to support a new OS with a low installed base. Amelio's Rhapsody was this model, and this is why to this date I have not gotten the feeling Amelio ever really groked the software business.
(Aside: his posturing in the book about Microsoft is ridiculous, at the rate Apple was going last year, Bill easily had an insurmountable negotiating advantage)
Anyway, back to Mac OS X.
Someone characterized it as Rhapsody + 6000 Mac API calls. This is accurate, but like anything the product is more important than the technology that generates it. Rhapsody developers are not orphaned. Yellow Box will be on Mac OS X.
Just like you could say the iMac is just an All-in-one G3 with USB/100BaseT and no SCSI/PCI/ADB/Serial ports, you could describe Mac OS X as Rhapsody + Mac OS APIs. However, this misses the big product message:
Users: Apple will deliver a version of Mac OS that runs all of your applications with protected memory (no crashing), dynamic resource allocation (no memory settings), and preemtive multitasking. High end users (publishing, digital media, web-content) rejoice!
Developers: Apple will provide you *one* API which will allow you to deploy to Mac OS 8.x and Mac OS X. (The secret of the PPC conversion)
This means you can just incremetally upgrade your code bases to the new OS. Plus, you still support Mac OS 8!
Investors: We are utilizing the NeXT aquisition to migrate the Mac OS to a technical foundation that will last the next 10+ years. We are also synching our business model with that of our developers: a desire to leverage their current codebase to garner upgrades for new features from the early-adopters (people will buy Photoshop 6 to run on Mac OS X, for better performance, no crashing, etc), while still supporting the 22 million potential customers out there who don't have Mac OS X (yet).
I know we were all excited about Yellow Box, and well we should be, because developing one application for Rhapsody and Windows can and does work. However, that brige is for the next gulf, not the current one Apple faces. Apple needs to migrate the OS to a modern architecture, and this makes Carbon the bridge. Just like the "Universal Headers" were the bridge between 68k and PPC.
As for Mac OS X on Intel, there was nothing about it mentioned in the keynote. Technically, if Carbon runs over Yellow Box completely, that could work theoretically. However, that is not a given, and we shouldn't assume or count on it until Apple says they will.
(The truth is, companies already have Win32 codebases, and they are not going to fuse or muck them up to merge with their Mac codebase.).
- Adam |
