Reading the Macalope’s ACME Pundit Saws post — wherein he skewers David Berlind about his ZDnet post, Is Apple getting dragged (kicking, screaming, or suing?) into licensing OS X? — I haven’t written down my own thoughts regarding the sale of Mac OS X to regular PC owners.
I think this is a situation where Apple could get in front of the market. Even though their sales are booming, Apple has taken a few risks that might have eroded their position. There was a quote where the company’s CEO said that if someone were to make their products obsolete, it should be them. I think this is telling — to get on top, you make risky moves like replacing a successful iPod mini with the iPod nano, or the iPod nano with a wildly different model. Living where I do, I can’t help but contrast this to a company like Kodak that practically begged everyone to take its core business away by not reinventing itself and its products. A cash cow product like film photography can go out to pasture more quickly than you think.
I’m not sure Apple has made this kind of move for the Mac, at least not yet. In fact, ever since the Intel transition, they’ve mostly sat on their Mac lineup. The MacBook was brand new, but derivative, and has seen several updates. The MacBook Pro is very close on the outside to the PowerBook G4, and has also seen several updates. The iMac, Mac Pro, and Mac mini have been quite static.
To get back to licensing, one area where Apple could do the unexpected would be to sell Mac OS X for generic PCs. I think to offset the potential for considerable support costs, it could be a separate edition of the operating system that sells for a higher price — maybe on the order of the current Mac OS X Family Pack or Windows Vista Ultimate at retail. This extra cost might also cover some aspects of software piracy, even to the extent of a system to attempt to lock the OS to a specific PC, similar to Windows activation.
The benefit, I think, of having Mac OS X on more generic hardware is that this might create a larger Mac community. I don’t think it would create a majority, by any means, but it would tap users who wouldn’t have run Mac OS X otherwise. And, it would allow those people who kitbash computers together some leeway in building their own systems.
Give customers one more reason to choose your system, because people who choose computers seem to be choosing Macs in increasing numbers. I don’t see Apple winning the managed IT space where computers are selected for the users, but I do see Macs being chosen by more people for their own purchases.
As long as Apple provides some compatibility information on what is known to work, this could effective get Macs into form factors where Apple isn’t. The mid-range headless desktop is one such place that the company fails to address, and yet I know many people who stress over the lack of hardware in the $900-1500 price range. In my observation, there is overlap between the people who don’t use Mac OS X today, UNIX/Linux users, and people who build their own systems.
New hardware options might also spur developers — and the community of users that surround them — to create drivers for the hardware that currently lacks it and improve existing drivers for everyone. This may be especially true for open source drivers.
One way to limit sales while tapping this homebrew market would be to require even a free ADC subscription (and the concomitant NDA) in order to buy through that non-retail channel. You can already buy upgraded ADC accounts there — and discounted developer hardware, if you have that option on your account — so why not sell Mac OS X for regular PCs there? Give it a trial run and see what happens.
I have long hoped that Apple would someday embrace people who build their own systems — I wrote a position paper about this for a marketing class back in the 90’s and my thoughts haven’t changed much on that score since then. I believe that selling Mac OS X to at least a section of the PC market makes sense. Given Mac OS X’s broadening appeal and its apparent reach into the power user and alpha geek markets, it may even cement Mac OS X as the operating system of choice.