Apple Switching to Windows? – Another Dvorak Miss

John Dvorak wrote another smoke-filled article projecting that Apple would soon switch to the Windows operating system. His conclusions were based on the observations of a professor of psychology who was “reading between the lines”. Dvorak also concludes that Jobs’ pursuit of some of the Apple rumor mill websites only makes sense in the light of this fantastic proposition. Frankly, the basic explanation, and one hopefully not missed by our psychology professor, goes more to the core of Jobs’ psyche than that. It’s simply a control issue, and there’s plenty of popular media around that describes Jobs as a “control freak”. If that’s true, then any leak out of his company would be worth pursuing, not counting the fact that Apple doesn’t ever want rumors to affect current hardware and software sales.

Further, Dvorak says that during Apple’s “switcher” campaign “nobody switched”. From what I heard and read, I would agree that Apple’s switcher campaign was not as effective as they had hoped it would be. But there were people who switched. I don’t think I can really claim to be one of them because I switched just before Apple started with that advertising campaign. My own personal experiences with both platforms convinced me to make the change, and I am glad I did.

Dvorak insists that Apple’s market share would increase with a switch to Windows. I beg to differ. Apple’s market share would plummet as it would lose its current Mac user base and be unable to differentiate itself from the other PC makers out there. Hardware alone would not be enough. Despite the fact that Apple’s hardware design is consistently more attractive than that of other computer makers, what makes a Mac is the overall integrated experience; and OS X is as much a part of that as anything else. The fact that Dvorak doesn’t understand that just convinces me that he may know Windows well, but he has no clue what the Mac is about.

Part of his argument is that Microsoft and Apple only extended their business agreement for Office on the Mac for 5 years. He asks, “What happens after that?” The answer: “Who knows?” With Jobs current momentum, why would he possibly sign a contract for a term longer than that? Why would he need to? Apple could develop its own version of Office that could supercede Microsoft’s on the Mac platform and might even find its way into the PC world. Granted, there’s no evidence of that. AppleWorks is nowhere close, development on it has stopped, and iWork is really a “poor man’s” substitute for Microsoft Publisher and PowerPoint. But my point is this: Who five years ago—except for Jobs himself—could have predicted Apple’s move to Intel CPU’s? Jobs may have a long-range plan, and I believe he does and has stated it. He has said he wanted to take back computing from Gates. An Apple switch to Windows simply does not fit that picture.