Drooling Fanboy
On the whole, I try to confine my “industry punditry” to lunch room and bathroom stall chitchat. But I’ll indulge in the filthy habit of going in public with it today because… Oh, there’s no real excuse, is there?
And, both because and despite my 10 year tour of duty at Froot.Com — 1988 to 1998 — I am still, of course, a drooling Apple fanboy.
I’ve been mentally composing this for a while, but a recent remark on Dan Jalkut’s red-sweater blog jogged me to set fingers to keyboard.
A Prediction
I predict that Apple will release something along the lines of “Cocoa For Windows” in the next couple of years.
Circumstantial Nonevidence
Yellow Box.
Some years ago, NeXT had a product known as “Yellow Box” which allowed NeXT applications to be compiled for Windows. I know this all too well, because I worked for a company which had — before my arrival — built their entire product on it, but essentially couldn’t ship it because of the licensing fees incurred. “Yellow Box” was the informal name of “WebObjects”, which had something to do with making server-based web applications… or something… but had the handy side effect of supporting existing NeXT application source code.
So what I’m saying is: The technology to execute Cocoa on Windows essentially exists… or did exist until recently.
X86.
Now that Macintoshes use Intel’s x86 CPU architecture, the temptation to run Windows apps and Mac OS X apps is ever greater. Dual-OS and virtualization solutions are nifty and all, but running everything under one OS might be tidier.
Safari & iTunes & QuickTime Player
The fact that Safari, iTunes, and QuickTime Player are all available on Windows demonstrates that some trailblazing work has been done along these lines, with modern (post-NeXT (ha ha)) Cocoa. Part of QuickTime includes a fairly substantial port of Carbon (Mac OS Classic) to Windows; it is possible the QuickTime Player and iTunes still use that. But Safari is almost certainly a Cocoa-based app.
Sell Software?
Apple has a pretty impressive catalog of application software these days. Between the “Pro” audio and video apps (Logic, Final Cut suite) and the consumer apps (iLife, iWork) it seems like there could be some business in selling software.
The iPod and Beyond
And of course, to provide ever-better integration with Apple’s revenue-important personal hardware products (iPod, iPhone, i-what-next?) they’ll continuously expand the desktop integration for them. Eventually there will be a feature that doesn’t make sense to wedge into iTunes!
What’s In It For Apple?
What’s the current market share for Apple personal computers these days? Something like, maybe, 5%? One could imagine them pursuing some of the other 95%, and that other 95% boots Windows. (Minus a sliver for Linux and other such geekly pursuits.) To target that market, they’ll have to ship a machine (an option, certainly) that boots Windows. And, within that market, they could leverage two advantages: Beautiful design, and every existing Mac OS X application.
Implications
All of the above implies that this “Cocoa on Windows” feature could be confined to Apple hardware, and/or Apple software. It’s hard to see any benefit to Apple to letting non-Apple Cocoa apps run on non-Apple hardware. Perhaps they’d license Cocoa-Box to end users, or to other PC manufacturers, or to Cocoa software developers. Or make it free, for the greater glory. Software is a strange, strange beast!
“30 years of personal computer market share figures”
from ars technica
I’m not so optimistic. In fact I think I shouldn’t use the word optimistic, because I’m not sure I’d even really WANT our software to be able to run on Windows. It seems exceedingly unlikely that the overall user experience could be high without all the fancy integration points that Mac OS X provides.
But in the short term, check out Cocotron if you haven’t seen it already.
“It seems exceedingly unlikely … fancy integration points…”
On the other hand: it’s amazing what a large well-funded team can actually create and get to work, when called upon to do so.
That is, if Steve said Do It, it’d get done. For example.
I feel your yuck, though.
Yeah – I guess if Steve wants to bring all the “integration points” along … :)
Steve says: Apple is a hardware company. Whatever it takes to sell more hardware, they will do. Right now they are busy with the huge fight they have on their hands fending off the pending loss of iTunes usage (and therefore, iPod revenue) as content owners seek to regain their cut.
And besides, I want LESS software, not MORE.