PowerPC: Part I -- Where does it fit in?

PowerPC -- it's not the beginning of the end. It's more like the middle (of the end).

By now it's old news that Apple abandoned the IBM-made PowerPC line of CPUs in favor of Intel inside (or is it Inside, capital I?). For the first time, Apple shares a processor family with its Windows-running bretheren. Now if the market share between Mac and PC was 50-50, or even 20-70, this would be even bigger news than it already is. But Apple is still in single digits when it comes to percentage of market share in the computing landscape.

What would really turn the computing world on its ear? An official Mac OS X port for the PC platform. It could be done. Apple could make billions.

They'd piss off everybody in Redmond, and Microsoft might pull the plug on Office for Mac. But Apple has already seen that kind of "trouble," with MS orphaning Internet Explorer for Mac. In that case, Apple thrived with its own Safari browser and the widely used Firefox, now the only browser to run on OS X, Windows and Linux (and yes, I am counting all the Mozilla derivatives as part of the Firefox family, even if Mozilla's the daddy and Firefox the fast-growing baby).

While on the subject, any software that has versions for all three major platforms -- Mac, Windows and Linux -- is a-OK by me. In addition to Firefox, the Abiword word processor and the Open Office suite are fine examples. It just makes it glaringly obvious how badly iTunes needs a Linux port. Keep it closed-source -- I don't care, just get iTunes on Linux already

Now back to our regularly scheduled computer whining ...!

Anything Microsoft did to "punish" Apple in the unlikely event that OS X for Windows is ever released would be dwarfed by fanfare, sales and sheer market-changing force by a real Windows competitor. After all, OS X 10.4 is the product upon which Windows Vista is modeled.

Hey, wasn't it the Classic Mac OS that drove Microsoft to develop Windows in the first place? (Answer: yes, for those of you too young to remember.)

OS X on a PC? You can already run Windows apps on an Intel Mac with Bootcamp or Parallels, and that has -- in some way -- boosted the esteem for Mac in the greater Windows-dependent world.

But a full OS X for PC can be done -- and should be. The fact that it hasn't, though, probably means it never will.