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.
