The Biz of Coding

Boot Camp & Microsoft Windows — New Vista for Apple Computer Inc.

by Ujwal Tickoo on April 6th, 2006

The stock market has responded positively to the Boot Camp Beta release by Apple Computer Inc. Apple’s stock price has risen by $4 in 2 days. The market clearly is excited at the prospect of Apple increasing its share of PC sales and at Intel Macs becoming mainstream hardware that runs Windows — the OS that runs around 90% of the world’s desktops.

What is Apple’s strategy? Clearly Boot Camp is an important part of Apple’s Strategy to push for Intel Mac sales and grab a larger market share. Macintosh sales account for almost 45% of the Apple Computer’s revenue of about $ 13.9 billion.

 Users, Apple, and Microsoft — all would be winners with MicroApple! According to Apple Boot Camp will be a feature in Leopard, Apple’s next major release of Mac OS X (v 10.5). This Beta release of Boot Camp is therefore a preparatory step for the general availability in Leopard. Thus, with Leopard users will get a well tested version of Boot Camp to install Windows XP on Intel Macs. Apple would then possibly go for Vista compatibility and if that happens I expect to see Microsoft touting Macintosh to be the "coolest" new PC for Vista and a great new channel for sales of Vista.

Walter Mossberg has run preliminary tests on installing and using Windows XP applications on Boot Camp. He has given a thumbs-up. In his review he states:

I’ve been testing Windows on a new iMac for several days and except for a couple of trifling annoyances, it runs perfectly, just like a stand-alone Windows PC. I was able to install Boot Camp and Windows XP Pro on the Mac in under an hour. After that, I installed 15 Windows programs, most unavailable in Mac versions, and all ran properly.

The implications are staggering. In next 2-3 years if Apple:

• swallows some undue pride (With the Boot Camp release Philip Schiller said “Apple has no desire or plan to sell or support Windows”)
• and fixes speed issues and bugs

Intel Macs could become as mainstream as DELL and HP laptops and PCs. Are Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller afraid of that? I guess they are secretly smiling.

POSTED IN: Apple, DELL, HP, Intel, Intel Mac, Leopard, Mac OS X, Macintosh, Vista, WindowsXP