g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
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Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est




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Thursday, February 16, 2006
13:47 - Is he still here?
http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/06/02/16/1826257.shtml

(top) link
Boy, everybody's really piling on this John Dvorak article today. And rightly so. Man—I've never seen such a relentlessly, anecdotally-and-empirically-provably false premise as his theory that all this explosive technological and cultural success Apple has had in the last five years has been nothing more than a prelude to... switching to making Windows boxes.

This theory is actually inherited from one "Yakov Epstein, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University", who must really know the secrets of brain manipulation, because his central four axioms apparently slip right past Dvorak's radar and into his library of fundamental truths even in spite of their glaring falseness:

Epstein made four observations. The first was that the Apple Switch ad campaign was over, and nobody switched. The second was that the iPod lost its FireWire connector because the PC world was the new target audience. Also, although the iPod was designed to get people to move to the Mac, this didn't happen. And, of course, that Apple had switched to the Intel microprocessor.

Wow. Just... wow.

Read the very first comment in the linked Slashdot article for a point-by-point refutation of these assertions. And then read on for about a billion anecdotal variations on the theme, mostly having to do with "Five years ago we would have laughed at the idea of using Macs; today we're an all-Mac shop" and related sentiments.

And there's more, too:

Though these points aren't a slam-dunk for Epstein's thesis, other observations support it. The theory explains several odd occurrences, including Apple's freak-out and lawsuits over Macintosh gossip sites that ran stories about a musicians' breakout box that has yet to be shipped. Like, who cares?

But if Apple's saber-rattling was done to scare the community into backing off so it wouldn't discover the Windows stratagem, then the incident makes more sense.

Uh... it does? How in the name of crap does Apple issuing C&D orders about a musicians' breakout box relate to a "Windows stratagem"? Has Dvorak been looking in the other direction all those times when Apple has gotten touchy about people blowing the cover on their upcoming product announcements? Ask "Nick DePlume" whether he thinks this is some new phenomenon on Apple's part that bespeaks Steve's paranoia that the rumor sites are getting too close to the Big Secret Windows Plan.

As does Bill Gates's onscreen appearance during Apple's turnaround when Jobs was taking a pot of money from Microsoft. The Windows stratagem may have been a done deal by then. This may also explain the odd comment at the Macworld Expo by a Microsoft spokesperson that Microsoft Office will continue to be developed for the Mac for "five years." What happens after that?

...Perhaps they renew the contract for another five years, just like they did this time after the previous five-year contract ran out (even though a few years went by in the interim while Microsoft kept making Office even though the contract didn't require them to). Maybe this is—I dunno—standard practice or something?

And is Dvorak speculating that Steve had made a deal back in 1998 to switch to making Windows PCs... ten years later? Dvorak's brain must be a spectacular place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

This switch to Windows may have originally been planned for this year and may partly explain why Adobe and other high-end apps were not ported to the Apple x86 platform when it was announced in January.

Brain... hurts... so bad...

He goes on and on to explain how Apple's big recipe for success is to "compete directly with Dell, HP, and the stodgy Chinese makers". Oh, be still my heart. This is a company that has made Intel dance to its tune, declining even to run the "Intel Inside" jingle on its ads, instead running a spot that denigrates Intel's entire chipmaking history as having been part of a misspent youth. But what if these Intel chips were inside a Mac... that was really a PC? Oh, imagine the possibilities, indeed.

Dvorak's inane idea that Apple meant to switch to Windows this year, but somehow wasn't ready for it and instead brought out an Intel compatibility layer for Mac OS X and an entire multi-platform binary architecture, not to mention a whole version of OS X that runs on Intel and has been secretly in development for five years—well, it just boggles the mind. The idea that Apple is getting ready to dump OS X, its crown jewel, arguably the most universally admired thing they make (only iTunes and the iPod are in its league) in favor of an "executive software layer" on top of Windows that allows users to pretend they're running OS X, along with ported Windows versions of all the iLife and iWork apps and the Pro suite... does this make sense to anybody but Dvorak and this Epstein fellow? Does anybody see any signs that Apple has any need whatsoever to change its entire business model—now that it's riding high in the headlines, a runaway success under the Christmas tree, a star performer in the stock market, a household brand name that inspires lust rather than mockery, a guaranteed revenue-magnet in every upscale mall, an entrenched partner in a media empire now headquartered in the hollowed-out shell of Disney, and a vindication of every bold and insane move Steve has made in the singleminded pursuit of building the Mac brand identity as something unalterably distinct from the Windows world?

Or does it seem more likely that Epstein and Dvorak just can't bear the thought that the future of computing is being written by more able and agile companies than Microsoft, and that Windows is going to have to adapt to it, rather than it to Windows?

Perhaps Dvorak is just bummed that he's losing readership after so many dopey predictions not coming true. Well, this'll certainly get him attention, but I don't think it's the kind he wants.

UPDATE: Don't miss this. Brilliant.


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