Today I am writing this blog in Safari 4.0 for the PC. I started out as a mac person because of the superior hardware, speed, and processing power offered at the time, using the now defunct "clone" called a "Supermac". When I left the mac platform to move to the PC platform, of course my fellow mac developers have heaped nothing but endless scorn on me for my choice, and invariably sent daily links to articles pointing out the obvious inferiority of the Windows / Intel based platform I use.
Eventually, the Mac succumbed to the Intel based chipset and I thought the game was up, and finally the Mac would simply become a flavor of windows offering distinct hardware and interfaces for all software, but take advantage of the windows platform in the back end (thus benefitting the end user). This didnt happen, and the Mac platform instead has worked tirelessly to lock the OS and its applications down to ensure continued control even though it has entered the world of the Intel platform, where up to then, the OS didnt care what apps you ran or what hardware you used.
Apple did not win the OS wars, and now with the impending release of Google's "Chrome OS" the competition has clearly changed altogether, that is, it is now between software that is an "Asset" vs software that is a "Service". Apple and Microsoft make billions of dollars by selling software as an Asset. You buy windows or OSX like you would buy a car, a chair, or a blender. You own it, you can resell it, if you had enough you could presumably borrow against it.
As the economy becomes increasingly abstracted to a service based model, and the internet bandwidth growth increases, the game is changing to a battle between which asset to buy, rather, whether or not "owning" software is a good idea in the first place. A real zinger is the recent plethora of online image editing "services" made using "asset" based software Adobe Flash that ends up competing directly with the "asset" based software called Adobe Photoshop and its incarnations.
So, as we see Safari 4 available for the windows platform, it becomes increasingly apparent that the Mac is slowly and inevitably going to migrate to the windows platform, and go into partnership with Microsoft to join forces and fight the new business model being signalled by Google and other service based software companies.
Microsoft continues to make $17 billion dollars in profit every year, and the Apple platform largely owes its very existence to continued support for the Microsoft Office Suite-which MS could end support for at any time. If Apple were running on top of a microsoft platform (now it runs on the UNIX platform), however, the threat of Microsoft pulling the plug on Office support would become moot, and Apple could continue to offer the same great hardware and interface elements that its customers love, PLUS eliminate any objection to "switching" to mac, because both platforms would run all the same software, and you wouldnt have to buy seperate licences for both platforms just because you liked using the OSX interface at times.
On top of that, Apple could then licence and distribute game software, and perhaps even release a gaming console based on XBOX technology, which would be a massive profit center for Apple.
Safari on the windows platform may only be the beginning, but the real competition to come will be the Asset vs Service model for software, and if MS, Apple, Adobe and the Gaming industry join forces, the Service model will have an even more difficult time becoming viable, as if MS werent a formidable enough enemy by itself.
So I'm a PC, and I'm a PC may be what we can expect in the near future. I always thought the PC guy was funnier anyway.
