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Last week, my friend John Martellaro posted an interesting think piece entitled ”Life after Apple.”. John cast his focus a considerable distance into the future, suggesting that robots may eventually displace the personal computer. And he may be right. The Japanese in particular have been busily developing robotic technology.

However, I think the personal computer has a substantial future ahead of it yet. What we are likely to see it is more consolidation and rationalization of the industry as it matures.

This is already happening -- the HP takeover of Compaq being a prima facie example. We’re going to see more of this, as we have with other technologies as key industries based on them involved. In the 1920s, there must have been at least 50, perhaps more, automobile manufacturers in the US, and probably that many again in the rest of the world. Now we have about a dozen major players left globally. General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Daimler-Chrysler, Honda, Renault/Nissan, Volkswagen, the Hyundai group, FIAT, Peugeot/Citroen, and BMW. GM has swallowed up SAAB and AM General, and has strong ties with Suzuki. Ford owns Volvo, Land Rover, Aston Martin, Jaguar, and has a controlling interest in Mazda. Toyota has business ties with Subaru and GM. Volkswagen owns Audi, Rolls-Royce, Lamborghini, and Skoda, and his links to Porsche. Daimler-Chrysler is partnered with Mitsubishi. FIAT has swallowed up Ferrari, Lancia, Alfa Romeo, and Maserati.

The shakeout has been even more intense in the commercial aircraft industry. In the medium to a jumbo sized airliner market there are just two major players left standing - - America’s Boeing and Europe’s Airbus Industrie -- both conglomerates.

The merger and rationalization phenomenon will unfold more rapidly in the computer industry because the technology develops so much more rapidly. Indeed, it already has to a much greater degree that is apparent to the casual observer. For example, most a laptop computers, regardless of brand, are constructed, and to a significant degree engineered, in Taiwan by specialist firms like Quanta and Alpha-Top and Hon Hai that may build Dells and Apples and HPs in the same factory.

However, at the marketing end look for continued convergence as well, which raises the question of Apple’s merger prospects. Because of its unique OS and ambidexterity as a hardware and software company, the economics of scale and manufacturing integration that obtained in the HP/Compaq consolidation would not apply in a merger of Apple with a Wintel PC maker. Unless, perchance, Apple were to port OS X to support Intel processors and the PC architecture. In such a turn of events, it might be in Apple’s interest to merge with one of the smaller PC outfits.

Then there is the possibility of Apple itself being taken over by another company. Disney has been cited as a possible suitor, as has Sun Microsystems. An intriguing but probably fanciful scenario would see IBM buying Apple. The question is whether Apple’s distinctiveness and unique corporate culture could long survive a merger or takeover, and whether the Macintosh would go along for long as more than just a badge - engineered PC variant. It’s an unsettling line of speculation for Mac aficionados, but the demise of the Mac is not a new apprehension for Mac veterans.

I recall back in the mid-’90s, gloomily leafing through PC catalogues and brochures in aid of determining what the least-offensive PC laptop to own would be, should Apple close up shop, which seemed like a real possibility at the time. It’s not a happy memory

Ironically, Apple had a larger market share (and the Mac OS even more so, thanks to Mac clones) in 1996 than it does today., but sales figures aren’t much help when you’re not making any money on the sales. Apple is a much healthier and better run company now than it was then.

But not out of the woods by a long shot. A conventional wisdom argument is that Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, and BMW do quite nicely with a lot less than a three percent market share respectively. However, that analogy is flawed in several ways. For one thing, Mercedes and BMW have better than 3 percent market share in their home markets, and Porsche is under the wing of the giant Volkswagen empire. For another, these high-end automobiles all run on the same fuel Toyota s and Fords do, use standard tires and lubricating oil, and so on.

Computer operating systems, on the other hand, need compatible software, and when one OS constitutes some 95 percent of the personal computer market, the software required by a niche OS that represents 3 percent (current sales -- probably more like 6-7 percent of the actual computer installed base) can’t be considered “standard” by any stretch of the imagination. If Macs were cars, they would require a special fuel and have their own uniquely sized tires.

I have long thought that it is a wonderful testimony to the disproportionate weight and influence the Mac platform enjoys in the computer marked that’s so much excellent software is available for it, but can this happy state of affairs be sustained if Apple can’t break out of the three percent rut, or worse, its market-share slippage continues? I’m inclined to think that there will be a gradual erosion in software support if Macs become any more marginalized that they are.

A case in point; following the release last month of Apple’s new freeware Safari browser, the developers of the Opera browser strongly suggested that their Mac version will soon be terminated, and the team working on the open source Chimera browser also made disgruntled noises about possibly discontinuing development. The point is that while Microsoft makes a proprietary browser that dominates the industry, no one has threatened to stop developing alternative browsers for Windows on account of it. The Windows market is so huge that there is plenty of room for lots of competition. A small browser developer can derive a handsome return from only a tiny fraction of the Windows market. The Mac market, on the other hand, in total represents the equivalent of a small fraction of the Windows market, and can only support so much crowding.

I am not saying that Safari is a bad idea. It’s a nice browser, that will get nicer, and if it can wean Mac users off Internet Explorer, I’m all for that. However, I would hate to see the day when the only browser available for the Mac was Safari, regardless of how good it gets.

Apple has to increase its market share to more than three percent if software developer interest in the platform is to be sustained, and one of the biggest impediments to that lately has been the G4 clock speed bottleneck. While the new aluminum PowerBooks introduced at MacWorld Expo are pretty exciting in terms of design, they offered no major advance in performance. (Note: this week Motorola announced its new MPC7457 and MPC7447 low power consumption G4 processors at up to 1.3 GHz, which one speculates find their way into Apple portables eventually, but they won't really come on stream until Q4, 2003).

The recent upgrades of the Power Mac towers and iMacs have been welcome, but not really anything to get up in the night and write home about. The Register’s Andrew Orlowski’s comment about the upgraded iMacs was a bit harsh, but it captured the dynamic that obtains.:

This state of affairs cannot go on indefinitely. The new Power Macs -- the top end model now at 1.42 GHz, were greeted with at best polite yawns, and in some quarters derision. This is of course unfair. Except for a tiny minority of high end users, 1.42 GHz dual processor machines have more power than we’re likely to ever tax In the normal lifespan of the machine. And, as Andrew noted, the megahertz/gigahertz gap myth is indeed that. My son uses 2.4 GHz Pentium said work, and insists that they feel slower for basic stuff like Finder navigation and Web work than his ancient 200 MHz 604e UMAX S-900.

However, it’s a matter of perception. Apple has kept its eggs in the G4 basket for too long, and is paying the price in sales erosion and diminished market share of its desktop machines. The IBM Power PC 970 can’t come on stream too soon, if it is indeed the future for Apple’s high-end models as widely rumored. But even if that comes to pass, not many PC users are going to get excited about 1.8 Ghz PPC 970s when 4 Ghz Pentiums are just around the corner, not to mention Itanium.

The 970 certainly doesn’t look like a comprehensive panacea. It doesn’t seem to be a likely candidate, for instance, for laptop computers -- a category where even the current 867 MHz and 1 GHz G4 chips are less than ideal due to the heat question issue (although the abovementioned new lower-powered G4 chips may help address this). There have been widespread reports that they new little 12-inch PowerBook runs too hot for some users’ comfort. Other than going with faster G3 chips (and my new 700 MHz iBook runs hot enough, the solution to that is a conundrum. It seems likely that Apple have to, with separate CPU families for desktop and laptop models respectively in a Power PC 970 era..

I hope that “life after Apple” will not become a reality anytime soon. OS X, despite my criticisms of it in some respects, is the best all-round personal computer operating system we’ve seen so far, and it would be tragic to see it wither away due to Apple’s difficulty in bridging the clock speed gap. There could be worse things than porting OS X to support Intel/AMD processors.

But if OS X were, heaven forbid, to disappear someday, I suppose the logical alternative would be Linux. At least nascent viability of Linux as a desktop OS makes the prospect of having to switch to PC hardware less distasteful than it was back in 1996, when Windows was the only real alternative. But let’s hope it never comes to that. We need to get behind Apple’s “switch” campaign with a vigorous personal evangelism, in aid of getting them market share critical mass back above niche status.

Charles W. Moore

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