Over the years, whenever Apple is deemed to be among the beleaguered, the critics come up with some outlandish suggestions. One of the most foolish, as far as I’m concerned, is the ongoing call for Apple to stop building hardware and license the Mac operating system, so Apple competes head on with Microsoft.

You see, they theorize that Apple cannot possibly compete with the $399 desktop, nor the $699 note-book, and is thus forever consigned to a minuscule portion of the PC market.

Only it can’t really work that way in the real world, of which some of those critics don’t seem to be a part. You see, Apple’s income from its operating system sales is comparably small in the scheme of things. How many $129 upgrade kits would they have to sell to drive several billions of dollars in revenue?

Quite a few indeed, far more than the number of Macs that Apple moves into the hands of users. Assuming that Apple has two or three percent of the worldwide PC market, even ten times that wouldn’t provide income parity.

Now some might suggest that, if Apple really went head-on against Microsoft, it would succeed beyond our wildest expectations. After all, more and more people are fed up with Windows, with its unreliability, software conflicts and especially malware. They are ready for an alternative, and if they could install Mac OS X on their PC boxes, they’d switch in a minute. Just like that!

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

This article was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 12:33 AM and is filed under News and tagged with: Apple Mac, Apple Moves, Billions Of Dollars, Mac Apple, Mac Operating System, Mac Os X, Macs, Night Owl, Notebook, Os X, Owl, Parity, Pc Boxes, People, Real World, Scheme Of Things, Upgrade Kits.