Booted Off The Island

This new Apple “Boot Camp” seems like a death knell for the Macintosh and its Unix-based OSX as a viable alternative platform for packaged software such as Office, Adobe, and so on. Dual boot systems are disastrous for alternative OS PCs. How many Amigas do you see around today? Dual booting between Amiga and DOS hindered the development of stand-alone software for that platform. By doing this, Apple reduces the attractiveness of OSX as a release platform for major software. Why bother doing an OSX version when you can just tell your “Mac” customers to run your program in Windows? It may help Apple sell more Macs in the short term, but in the long term it further removes Apple’s distinctiveness and transforms it even more into just another boutique PC vendor similar to Alienware Dell.