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Electronic News, April 28, 1997 by Sarah Cohen

Apple executive VP Ellen Hancock declared in the Seybold keynote address that Apple maintains an 80 percent market share in the publishing field. Others, including Intergraph Computer System's executive product director, server business unit, Lee F. Hanson, said he felt Apple had a 60 percent market share, with Wintel systems accounting for the other 40 percent of the publishing space.

Apple made some news at the conference with its debut of two new PowerPC 604e-based servers at the conference, the Apple Workgroup Server 9650/233 and the Workgroup Server 7350/180, claimed to be four to eight times faster than comparable Wintel servers and important to the publishing community for the timely transference of data.

But Apple's Wintel rivals also made news. Microsoft said it "has established major momentum as a publishing platform on the server and the desktop." Thirty-five companies, said Microsoft, lined up to demonstrate Windows operating system-based products and tools for publishing customers. Meanwhile, Compaq Computer, Intel and Adobe Systems held a press briefing to express their "commitment to digital publishing on the Intel platform," Adobe making its first public showing of Adobe Illustrator 7.0 and ATM for Windows NT.

Apple's Ms. Hancock said that she's "concerned" about the Wintel threat but "comfortable" with Apple's position in the publishing space. Apple/PowerPC computers are "superior" to Intel/Microsoft for the time-sensitive publishing business, stated Ms. Hancock. "The PowerPC outperforms Intel and MMX, and if you add our Trimedia card (that includes Philips' 4-billion-operations-per-second Trimedia multimedia processor), we outperform them even further."

Intergraph's Mr. Hanson played the devil's advocate. "The problem with Apple is I'm not sure they're capable of being a long-term player. Apple doesn't know where it's going to go. When is their operating system coming out? I'm not sure if they know. We chose a standard platform (with Intel inside) a long time ago, way before anybody else thought it was reasonable."

Perhaps Bob Roblin, senior VP of marketing for Adobe, a company that's vested in both Microsoft and Apple, has a more impartial view of the two sides. "In our own research, we've seen that people who are new to the Mac, those in the film or the entertainment industry, are more likely to chose the PC platform. Those in print and graphics, who are already familiar with the Mac, are extremely loyal, and we don't expect a great rush to the other side. The Mac users can also be confident that there won't be integration problems between their hardware and applications--the PC is moving toward that point."

But are there really two distinct camps these days--Apple/PowerPC versus Intel/Microsoft, et al., or has Apple, with the acquisition of NeXT Software and NeXT's NeXTStep OS, OpenStep OS and Mach-core, all of which run on Intel architecture, flirted with the opposing camp? Apple's Ms. Hancock suggested that Apple is indeed interested in running future operating systems on the Intel architecture. "We've had a firm mandate from our customers that our new operating system must have a broader reach" and although Apple "really likes the PowerPC...we're intent on developing a cross-platform operating system."