It looks like Apple has a good chance of succeeding with its digital hub strategy. He has the imagination, savvy and guts necessary to become the 21st century digital media mogul.
More than ever, Apple is going to transition the iPod to an increasingly Mac OS X-like software architecture. The long rumored iPhone will be introduced in a short timeframe, and as predicted, will follow the 6G iPod in being a standardized, OS-X-like Apple device that will bring revolutionary integration between the Mac and non-Mac products which Apple offers.
Dan Farber written about Apple and the Macintosh in the future: “I would give Apple a good chance of succeeding with its digital hub strategy. He has the imagination, savvy and guts necessary become a 21st century digital media mogul�.
How Microsoft sees the Macintosh future? Not surprisingly, MS doesn’t see much change with the Mac moving to Intel. They’re in the process of creating the next version of Office for the Mac, and it’ll run on both PC and Intel Macs. For Windows development, Apple suddenly creates PCs, too. Phil Schiller said: “We’ve heard that Apple won’t keep people from installing Windows on Macs.� The slow move to the PC side did scare them? Obviously, it doesn’t. “We’re not in the business of selling PCs ourselves. We sell software licenses. A Mac user who buys Virtual PC with a Windows license or buys a Windows license for an Intel Mac or buys a Windows license for a no name PC: Same thing for us-we sell a Windows license� said Phil Schiller. Interesting years ahead…
Dan Smith, an Apple Principal Software Engineer, said, “The only thing I can really say is that it is been looking down the line five years o so, with respect to what hardware will be available. A lot of the ideas people have had require a significant amount of hardware. Some of those ideas are probably going to see the light of day in the not too distant future, as the hardware developers catch up the minds of the software developers.
Eric Wilfrid from the Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit explained what Microsoft’s .NET means to MacBU.
Microsoft .NET is a platform for something we call XML Web services, which are intended to address the integration problems. It spans many different platforms. First, the client platform, where there is a number of different devices, the PowerBook right there in the center, it indicates the readiness, the willingness to make this a part of the .NET platform. The edge of the network is rich with computing power, and it’s tremendously underused today.
Microsoft .NET also defines a set of tools, Visual Studio.NET, the .NET frameworks, the XML, the .NET My Services API. These tools span in a single, consistent programming model across client, server, and service to provide very high productivity experiences for developers to set up these Web services, or the clients that access them.
Microsoft .NET is built on open, broadly ported protocols and standards, simple, for iniquitous communications, really HTTP and the Internet, the universal data format for .NET is going to be XML, a self-describing kind of package of data. Simple Object access Protocol (SOAP) is the protocol were going to use to allow services to talk to services, or devices to talk to services, and it will make the service do things.
How does Microsoft.Net relate to the Mac? The Mac is a great client platform for connecting to .NET Microsoft Mac Business Unit, will create connections between the client software, Office, Internet explorer, other things, and these back end services that provide the next level of services that can be provided, so that the computing platform becomes that much more compelling.Â
There will be high quality XML Web services support, well build integration that is necessary with Passport and .NET My Services, well build all the features on top of that will allow the next great version of Office to exist, and to be attractive to the user.
In a few short years, a rather small group of very talented and dedicated people at Apple built a computer system designed to be used by ordinary people. What specific circumstances created this conjunction of technical talent is beyond our knowledge. However, it did happen and for a brief time there was an unparalleled flash of brilliance that is now fading image. Hopefully this fading flash will be rekindled in the future. Having the Lisa legacy without learning from it would be worse than not having a legacy at all.
