Apple Could Buy Dell, and Linux Is No Threat to Mac OS X
- From: Chance Furlong <t-bone@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:52:46 -0600
From Low End Mac:
http://www.lowendmac.com/misc/08mr/apple-dell-linux.html
Cuss and discuss.
Apple Could Buy Dell, and Linux Is No Threat to Mac OS X
Charles Moore 2008.12.01
One of the things I love about writing for Low End Mac is the fecundity
of imagination and variety of ideas presented on the site by its
eclectic team of writers. I suppose that anyone who identifies with the
low end approach to computing tends to venture off the beaten track of
conventionality and be inclined to explore various "what if" side roads
and detours as a matter of satisfying curiosity.
Apple Could Buy Dell
For example, we had Frank Fox's proposing last week suggesting that
Apple use some of the cash in its money bin (currently in the
neighborhood of $24.5 billion - more than the GNP of some small
countries, and zero debt) to buy Dell Computer outright. It's an
audacious notion, and the irony would be delicious, given Michael Dell's
famous advice to Steve Jobs in 1997 regarding Apple: "I'd shut it down
and give the money back to the shareholders."
Apple's market capitalization surpassed that of Dell a little more than
eight years later, and according to Wikipedia now stands at four times
Dell's market cap.
In fairness to Mr. Dell, in 2005 he told Fortune's David Kirkpatrick,
"If Apple decides to open the Mac OS to others, we would be happy to
offer it to our customers." I'm sure that given the Vista debacle, he
would be even more enthusiastic about that option today.
Dell, which was once the world's largest PC maker, dropped into second
place behind behind HP in 2006 and has been laying off thousands of
workers since last year.
Anyway, despite the company's current troubles, Apple buying Dell
definitely isn't the stupidest idea I've ever heard. As Frank notes,
Dell's current market cap has fallen to $18.55 billion, so Apple could
buy it outright out-of-pocket and still have lots of reserve cash left
for a rainy day.
I think Frank's suggestion that Apple could utilize Dell as its
launching board into the enterprise market as well as a vehicle for
entering the lower priced personal computer market, such as the
hot-selling netbook category, without watering down the Apple brand's
premium cachet has a lot of merit. The Dell name has plenty of cred with
the narrow minded, Microsoft-centric corporate and institutional IT set,
and those who patronize the bottom-feeder end of the market would
finally have a way to run the Mac OS on cheaper hardware than Apple is
willing to push out the door with an Apple logo affixed.
While the argument can be made that this would cannibalize some lower
end Apple branded hardware sales, I think that on the balance the
expanded coverage and influence of the Mac OS on a wider spectrum of the
PC market would more than compensate for any lost MacBook and iMac sales.
Linux Still Not Ready for Prime Time
Posted on the same day was Simon Royal's musing about whether Linux
could ever replace OS X. That's a question I've been pondering for about
a decade now, and I even went so far as to install first SuSE Linux and
then Yellow Dog Linux on my WallStreet PowerBook back on the cusp of Y2K.
The answer that experience supplied to Simon's question was "definitely
not at that stage of Linux development," but I've been vicariously
following the progress of desktop Linux over the past few years and been
tempted to try Ubuntu Linux, if I could ever find the spare time to
climb the learning curve.
Also, being smitten with the idea of netbooks, Linux would be a way of
dipping my toes into those waters without using Windows, which I detest.
As Simon observes, Mac OS X and Linux have a considerable amount in
common, both being branches of the Unix tree, and Linux has the
advantage of being free.
The flip side is that Linux is still geeky, and I have to confess that
I've never taken the opportunity to venture into the command line side
of OS X's potential, so all that is pretty much terra incognita for me,
hence the aforementioned learning curve. I'm a GUI kind of guy, so the
critical factor for me is development of the GNOME and KDE GUI
interfaces for Linux, and my impression is that while they have improved
substantially from where they were in the late 1990s when I was
experimenting with Linux, they still fall well short of the, as Simon
puts it, "gracefulness, reliability, and perfection of Mac OS X."
Be that as it may, the concept of desktop Linux at least provides me
with a "plan B". Back in the late 90s, that was predicated on the
concern that the Mac OS might disappear if Apple's than 2% or so of the
personal computer market continued to erode. Happily that didn't happen,
and the plan B issue has morphed into whether I sometime get fed up
enough with Apple to jump ship, or a PC maker comes up with a piece of
hardware I just can't resist.
It hasn't happened yet, but never say never.
Charles Moore has been a freelance journalist since 1987 and writing for
Mac websites since May 1998. His The Road Warrior column is a regular
feature on MacOpinion, and he is a news editor and columnist at
Applelinks.com.
.
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