Thoughts from MacWorld
After attending MacWorld, I am rethinking a bit my MacOS X in Dell boxes theory. I think that Apple will not officially endorse that MacOS X runs on non Apple computers (even though I really think that this will happen, someone will come up with a simple way of doing that). I think that the opposite will in fact happen and it will become very easy (perhaps not with XP due to the BIOS issue but certainly with Vista) to run Windows on an Apple machine. In spite of Apple doing a fantastic job providing the best must-have applications in MacOS X (iLife looks really good, specially iWeb, when I saw jobs demoing it to create a web site and a blog with a podcast, I was thinking that this is exactly what I have been looking for in Windows and could not find) and Microsoft comitting to anoher 5 years of Office on MacOS X (so no rush for Apple to release their own spread sheet), people will still need Windows once in a while since there are too many business applications that only run on Windows. However, now that Macs are no longer more expensive than Windows based computers (check out this article for a very good price comparison between the new MacBook Pros and a similarly configured Dell notebook) and actually in some respects better (we still need to know about battery life though), I can get myself a MacBook Pro, install Vista when is ready, and spend most of my time on MacOS X and only switch to Windows when it is strictly necessary. Is this going to take market share from Microsoft? Certainly, but it seems that it might actually affect more PC manufacturers like Dell if people start buying Macs instead of Dells (at the end of the day, Microsoft market share of the PC market is 97% versus Dell’s market share of 22% and their margins are also much better so Dell has a lot more to lose). So no wonder that Michael Dell said that they will gladly license MacOS X for their computers, they probably see the risk. Either way, I am expecting 2006 to see the year of the Mac for Apple instead of the year of the iPod as it was 2005 and this is only good news for computer users and Mac developers.
Another thing that kept me thinking is that one of the potential growth opportunities for Apple is .Mac. Their new release of iLife is much more integrated and they only have 1 million paid registered users (nothing compared to any other Web company like Yahoo!!) which is probably less than 5% of their users. People argue that at $100 a year is expensive but if you start to think, I pay $24.95 for my flickr pro account (which I really only use to share pictures with friends and family, I really do not care or use too much the community features) and $8.95 a month for my Typepad blogging account that provides one of the worsts interfaces for blogging I have seen, nothing to do with the beauty of the new iWeb and it only allows blogging, not creating a full web site as iWeb does. So I will actually be saving money by switching to .Mac and I get a better experience and lots of other features I do not get today. The downside is that I need to have a Mac but assuming the new MacBook Pros do not overheat as much as they did at MacWorld (lots of geeks are going to have reproduction issues if they have those laptops for too long on their laps) and they provide a decent battery life, I am certainly switching in February. I think that what Apple needs to do with the .Mac pricing is to change it to a monthly pricing instead of a yearly pricing. Not change the overall pricing, just how they charge for it, I know it is a perception issue but that is how consumers take purchasing decisions, based on perceptions. Obviously the other strategy will be to port iLife to Windows and open up .Mac to Windows users using iLife, in a move similar to the port of iTunes to Windows to reach the Windows community with iPods and the ITunes Store but this is probably less likely to happen short term since it might then drive users to Windows based PCs instead of to Macs.
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