Welcome to Boot Camp

Rabid has always found it interesting that Apple considers itself to be the world’s best marketing company, when often it seems to succeed despite some seriously weird marketing decisions.

The most obvious missed opportunity is of course, making a better Windows machine than anyone else. Now that there are Intel chips inside Macs it was really only a matter of time before somebody made them boot WinXP.

A couple of geeks did it first, and collected a cool US$14K prize.

Apple obviously already knew how to do it, but wasn’t telling anyone. After the geeks succeeded Apple must have decided since it was happening anyway, they’d better release the “official” version.

Rabid has been around long enough to remember when Steve Vamos was running things at Apple Australia, having managed to escape from IBM after many years servitude.

Mr Vamos was mighty impressed when he saw the design and build quality of Apple’s kit, and was brave enough to suggest to the Cupertino cabal that the best thing Apple could do would be to make a killer Wintel box and stop futzing around with its lame Mac OS.

The Apple heavies just said “You Aussies! Such jokers!” without realising that he was serious, and Steve eventually moved on to ninemsn before ending up running Microsoft Australia.

Ten years later Apple finally realised Steve was right, and collected an instant 10 percent share price hike. I hope Steve kept his Apple stock options after he left, so he can truly have the last laugh.

The people who really need to visit Boot Camp are the marketing experts in Cupertino who have spent the last twenty years avoiding every obvious opportunity to garner some market share.

And it seems it was the iPod which convinced them to jump aboard the Windows wagon. Let’s face it, Apple couldn’t flog umpteen million iPods if they only synched with Macs.

Grudgingly, Apple has had to admit that even though WinXP might not be perfect, neither is the average PC or the average PC user. But there sure are lots of them. And if as many of them bought a Mac as have already bought an iPod....

Gotta go! Stockbroker calling!