Roads Not Taken

Lately Apple and Intel both seem to be doing fairly well. However both of these companies have overlooked potential opportunities. Choices like these will eventually make the difference between success and failure.

Apple has been quite prominent on tv lately with their coffee house neo hippie Mac against the dull and untalented PC. It's cute I suppose but it certainly doesn't show Apple's reality. Apple has been boosted tremendously by both its iPod and iTunes website. Apple managed to get these into the market when no one else was doing it and has been successful. Unfortunately, both of these are doomed to follow in the footsteps of Sony's Walkman and become commodity consumer items. To put it simply, neither iPod nor iTunes can stand up to real competition. It is extremely unlikely that Apple will be able to come up with another consumer success like the iPod. One wonders how Apple will fair when its computers have to stand on their own against increasing competition.

Apple's big problem is that it is heavy in desktop systems but light in servers. Apple's natural ally would have been Sun. Sun is very heavy in servers but much lighter in desktop systems. Sun/Mac would have been a perfect match with Apple providing the experience and hardware for desktop/client and Sun providing the muscle and support for workstation/server. With MacOS now based on unix this could have worked well with a merger of sorts between MacOs and Solaris. This would have been an ideal situation for Apple where its Macs fitted seamlessly into heavy duty Sun backend server environments.

In terms of software, a Sun alliance would be even more profound. In spite of the hokey antics on Apple's commercial, the PC is not the Mac's true competitor. Apple's true competitor is a company that Apple has no chance of beating. This company is Microsoft. Microsoft is all too aware that Macs don't run Windows. However, Apple is all too aware that Macs are tied to Microsoft applications. This is why Apple does not and will not sell a version of MacOs for PC's. The retaliation from Microsoft would be epic and would probably include suspension of any further upgrades or releases for Mac versions of Microsoft Office. This is not something that Apple can afford.

However, an alliance with Sun would include Sun's Star Office suite as well as a major contributer to Open Office. With much less pain, Apple could have removed itself completely from Microsoft's control and opened up a true market for its products including MacOS for PC. That this did not happen could be due to a lack of vision among Apple executives or perhaps Apple just didn't like sharing the spotlight with Sun. Of course it could be that Sun was not open to such an alliance. Whatever the reason, this alliance was pretty much Apple's only ticket into the future. Alliances with HP, Dell, and Gateway are out of the question as they are direct competitors. Apple's deal with Intel now makes a Sun alliance nearly impossible along with any deal with Cray. And, Apple has already dropped IBM. The only name left that I can see is SGI. This wouldn't be as good as a Sun deal but with a bit more effort I could see it working. I have serious doubts though that the upper management at Apple can see this. But, without it, I would say that Apple's days are numbered as a desktop player. The desktop will continue to become more competitive as will mobile. Without a heavy share in servers Apple will eventually become marginalized. If this idea comes as a shock to anyone who really likes Macs then just consider the same goofy commercial if support were discussed.

Hello. I'm a PC and I'm supported by nearly all of the top electronics manufacturers and system builders.

I'm a Mac and I'm supported by, well . . . uh, just Apple.


Intel had a similar blunder with Transmeta. In fact, it is staggering to think that out of all of the losing businesses that Intel picked up like lint on a sticky lollipop they failed to see the perfect match. The Transmeta Crusoe was designed as a VLIW processor. It is true that this technology has been slow but this is primarily because the software layer translates X86 instructions into very disimilar VLIW instructions. However, this would not have been the case with Itanium. Crusoe was very much like a stripped down version of Itanium and and could have executed most of the Itanium instructions with microcode and only used the software layer for more complex translations. In 2000 the Transmeta company could have been purchased by Intel for what would have amounted to spare change. This would have given Intel an inexpensive, low power processor that was completely compatible with Itanium.

Intel could have used this technology immediately for embedded processors, palmtops, and thin and light notebooks. With a bit of effort I'm certain Intel could have beefed up the Crusoe and built a very nice second generation chip that would have been suitable as a general mobile processor. This could have allowed Intel to move to dual core earlier for more power. The design would have been good because it would have been able to run X86 better than the primative translator on Itanium but would have run much faster with native Itanium code. This technology would have meshed very well with Microsoft's .NET environment for even better performance. Proof that this could have been done is evident from the fact that AMD did this very thing when it bought Geode in 2003.

This foothold at the bottom of the market would have made it much easier for Itanium to hold its ground. It is even possible that by using the Transmeta technology in Itanium that Itanium could have run faster with X86 code. By almost any standard this would have been an inexpensive purchase that could have yielded substantial benefits for Intel. Or, in other words, it was a good risk. I still have no idea why Intel didn't take advantage of this opportunity. The almost certain result will be that Itanium will continue to be pushed out of markets by Opteron and by newer C2D based Xeons and will be pushed out of the market altogether in the next few years.