In a stunning move, BAPCo, the industry-standard Windows benchmarking consortium, announced that Apple Computer has joined up as a member. BAPCo is responsible for the SYSmark 2004SE and MobileMark benchmark suites we use at PC Magazine Labs for testing PCs. BAPCo also produces the webserver test WEBmark. BAPCo members include AMD, Intel, Transmeta, ATI, nVidia, Microsoft, Ziff Davis Media, CNET, Dell, HP, Toshiba, Seagate, VNU, Atheros, and ARCintuition.
…Apple wants to make it official they’re making the fastest “Windows-compatible” laptops? 🙂
Nah, seriously I think they’re after one of the two following:
a) ensuring that Chameleon (rumored virtualization technology possbily integrated into OS X 10.5 AKA Leopard) looks real good
OR
b) “sabotage” benchmarks so Windows looks slow/bad. Not that they need to. 🙂
I really hope we do not see Windows apps running under Leopard. I worry about developers not bothering with OS X if OS X can run Windows apps.
We saw something similar in the OS 2.1 (?) days when it had a full Windows subsystem to run Windows 3.x apps.
And microsoft recently joined the OpenDocument committee. Companies participate in such groups because they need to understand the environment that they compete in.
It’s not like they have fanboyist tendencies that prevent them from acknowledging the presence of competing products.
No operating system that has tried to run Windows apps natively has significantly increased market share once that capability was added to the OS. In fact, they lost market share. OS/2 is a prime example.
Note the biggest problem was that IBM didn’t and still doesn’t have a clue on how to market anything to the average user. That was OS/2’s biggest problem.
Windows programs should continue to accessable only through a virtural computer interface and automatically reduces the speed of the apps that run in it so that developers have a real reason to write native MAC apps.