Apple has recently demonstrated a breakthrough (arguably) technology called XGrid which, in short, uses the collective processing power in a LAN to speed up processing intensive calculations. The implications are, in my opinion, being severely understated by Apple, as this potential X.4 feature is useful for almost all markets that Apple caters to.
Some of Apple's core markets are the educational markets, Graphics and Video rendering markets and the consumer market, consisting of private homes and small businesses. It is my assumption that XGrid, if implemented correctly (as an open API), could potentially provide benefits to all of those markets.
1. The educational market
The educational markets is where Apple currently "targets" the XGrid application. It's used to utilize unused processing power for programs like BLAST and other processing power intensive applications, that's usually run on Server farms, mainframes or computational clusters.
2. Graphics and Video
This is where XGrid has a great potential. Programs like Shake, Final Cut, Photoshop would potentially benefit a great deal from the increased processing power. If Apple were able to make a plug-in/code-rewrite to incorporate XGrid in key applications such as Final Cut and Shake for the X.4 release, the ‘wow’ factor would be significant. Just imagine a small workgroup being able to do special-effects on a machine 3-5 times faster than they can now just by upgrading to the latest OS. This productivity increase would not easily be matched by Microsoft/Sun/IBM with their offerings, since they for now (to my knowledge), doesn't have products in the market that cater to these market segments. This is where I believe Apple can toot the XGrid feature as a real time-saver.
3. Consumer market
XGrid also caters to the consumer market, if developed so that there's no setup (as with Rendezvous). Think of the small family with 4 Macs in home-LAN. Someone in the family wants to compress a large video into DivX. Now (s)he can utilize all 4 computers in the home to speed up the process. This is of course also useful for iMovie, iDVD(?). It could also bring more processor intensive features to the consumer market.
4. Software development
This is where it's actually already being used, as XCode already supports it(the Distributed Builds feature), but it could be further tooted to show how many places XGrid can be a useful feature.
There are of course many more instances where XGrid would be immensely helpful, but I can't imagine them(in comments please!), and we'll have to wait until creative programmer think of them. But even with just the features I've outlined, XGrid has potential to be a real deal-maker for MacOS X.4. This is further strengthened by the fact that neither Linux or Windows has these capabilities. Even further, Microsoft probably won't be able to incorporate a similar feature before they release Longhorn in 2006-2007, at the earliest. The same doesn't go for Linux, but Linux will have a hard time with the integration part (i.e. the ease of use/ease of installation...well basically, ease-of-use).
Summary
From this article, I think it is evident that both native Palm-syncing and XGrid incorporation into MacOS will be features that can achieve the typical "Apple touch” and further strengthen Apple as a leader in OS development and integration.
About the author:
Søren Friis Østergaard has a bachelor in Computer Science and Business Administration and is studying for a Master of Science in Management of Innovation and Business Development at the Copenhagen Business School. He's been following the MAC OS development for the last 4 years.
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