Is Apple's Steve Jobs preparing a Longhorn in sheep's clothing?

Rethink IT, April, 2005 by Peter White

There's something evangelical about Steve Jobs that won't be denied. He appears to run Apple Computer for fun.

Filings just made by the company show that Jobs once again agreed to take just $1 to be the CEO of the company, after earning just $1 last year. He also gets no new share options and he makes money purely on the rise and fall of the share price and the 10m shar es he got when he rejoined the company, exercisable in March 2006.

But at $42 a share, he's set to sell those shares for a cool $420m, which is a lot of fun really. Jobs can add this to the already considerable financial empire he has amassed for being the founder of Apple and for building up Pixar, the animated movie company that he also founded and runs. His net worth has already been estimated at $2.6bn, with over $1bn of that coming when he took Pixar public. Those share options would get him over the $3bn mark, but we're pretty sure he's not keeping count too carefully.

WORKING FOR APPRECIATION

The essence of Apple, and the enjoyment for Jobs, is working with good ideas. More to the point it is taking good ideas and making them happen. Jobs is like a rock star. He wants the money, sure, but mostly he wants what he does to be appreciated.

Jobs doesn't care too much if an idea is completely original, but when you meet him or listen to him speak, he quite clearly gets a buzz out of taking the essence out of an idea and executing it properly, without all the mistakes that other companies can sometimes make.

Funnily enough, a number of those ideas might come back to haunt dominant PC software company Microsoft. One of Microsoft's biggest failings of late has been describing how its new operating system, Longhorn, is going to work, hut then not only Failing to deliver it, but dropping an interim XP upgrade in the way.

It is well documented that what made Longhorn late at Microsoft was the fact that its designers were busy trying to make the existing XP architecture more secure. There was no point giving enterprise clients more upgrade headaches when they already had their hands full trying to stop malware destroying their existing installations.

One of the attractions of shifting PCs to the Mac that appeals to some enterprises is the lack of major malware on the Mac. The Mac is not so widely open as the PC is, it doesn't cater for a legion of programmers all over the world or offer simple programming interfaces so that they can make the device do what they want.

That fact might once have been described as the failing of the Mac. It was semi-closed, it didn't let you at the guts of the machine, and new software was hard to write for it. Perhaps that's why Jobs lost the first PC war so spectacularly to Microsoft.

But, of course, the Mac OS is no longer quite so closed as it was, running as it does as the sole application on a version of Berkcley Standard Distribution Unix.

So the appeal is certainly there for enterprises to reconsider changing over to Macs, but how much more appealing that might be if all of the facilities promised on the Longhorn operating environment arrive on the Mac first?

Longhorn will go back to a task-based environment, dumping the dated desktop metaphor and using a .Net-based graphics API called Avalon instead.

It will have a sidebar panel that includes links to local and remote resources and fast search facilities on the machine and out onto the internet (to compete with Google).

It may include the Palladium security technology Microsoft is developing with Intel and AMD, which will give software access to hardware, unchanging identifiers, so that spare and malware can be traced and potentially eradicated.

Longhorn is also supposed to offer an integrated recordable DVD capability, which Microsoft has said will focus around the unpopular DVD Forum High Density disk, which has waning support. The idea is to be able to copy video from a digital camcorder directly to recordable DVD, bypassing the system's hard drive entirely, if desired.

Auto update and error reporting were meant to be a feature of Longhorn, but they slipped into XP quietly and will re-emerge improved in Longhorn.

A TIGER IN THE MAC TANK?

Taking a look at the upcoming Tiger version of OS X, the Mac operating system, which will be out in the middle of this year, it is tempting to question just how much of that function described above could already be in it?

Well, the searching ability so--that users can find anything, in real time, on their machine, including inside emails, by typing just a few characters--will built into Tiger, just as it is expected to be in Longhorn. But the Tiger OS could be here at least a full year before Longhorn.

The Tiger Server will include native support for 64-bit applications and offer compatibility back to 32 bit apps. Sound familiar?

Also the sidebar panel analogizes to something Apple calls a 'dashboard', which is a way of loading mini-applications that Apple calls widgets, with the touch of a function key. These can be anything from a share price ticker that reaches out to the internet, to your diary.