Pasta-damn, I hope Mr. Gruber is correct in his analysis! This addresses my fear: companies like Adobe and Microsoft will stop developing Mac OSX versions because with Boot Camp, you can instead now use a Windows version of any software program.
God forbid my bank makes this (faulty) assumption.
The Gap already wrote off all Mac users as not worth the time to make a standards compliant site. But I can do without the Gap. I cannot do without Adobe, Microsoft, et al.
Also, for those six of my seven regular readers who don't know: Classic is Mac OS 9, which runs as a virtual OS within OS X. I personally haven't used it in a long time (last time: reading legal, estate documents formatted in Word Perfect).
Daring Fireball: Windows: The New Classic
... And this points to the rather delicious conclusion that Apple is casting Windows, including Vista, as the new Classic.Boot Camp portends Apple’s intention to become a Windows-only PC manufacturer no more than Classic served as a hedge against Apple’s commitment to Mac OS X — that is, not at all.
The fear that Windows-on-Mac-hardware implies the eventual death or marginalization of Mac OS X is baseless. Sure, third party developers could start using “Just boot into Windows” as their answer to questions regarding Mac support, but this is no more likely to be popular or successful than it was for developers whose OS X strategy was “Just use Classic”.
This is a move of supreme confidence — Apple relishes the comparison between Mac OS X and Windows XP, and Microsoft has shown enough of Vista via its widely-available beta seeds that Apple quite obviously isn’t afraid of that comparison, either.
Windows is so ubiquitous that the vast majority of Mac users are already quite familiar with it; I see no chance that Boot Camp is going to cause any Mac users to realize that they’ve been missing out on something better. But from the other side, Apple is confident that most Windows users who give Mac OS X a shot are going to prefer it — again, much in the same way that most long-time Mac users preferred Mac OS X to the old Mac OS.
