Is Windows dead?

With Vista sales abysmal, and the prospects for 7 grim, is a beige-box version of OSX far off…?

Well, I just gotta say — I’ve spent the last month supporting hundreds of users for a local ISP, and the number of Vista users?

3.

That leads me to speculate further on an impending situation I’ve suspected for a long time. Of course, Dell’s abandonment of Vista was a very obvious stake in the heart of the Windows operating system. But what will replace it?

The OSX86 project has been quietly making drivers for OSX for several months now, which allow support for a wide-variety of ‘non-supported’ hardware. The amusing part is that, due to the OSX EULA, Apple can ‘adopt’ these drivers and not follow the FOSS concepts of open-source, since the software itself violates the EULA.

Why hasn’t Apple done anything about OSX86 or the multitude of Dell Mini 10v’s or what-have-you running OSX? Well, duh.

Here’s what’s going to happen, and fairly soon.

Apple: Dear Microsoft. We intend to release a mainstream version of OSX with a wide-scale driver layer. We intend to place our product into all commercial retailers for a competitive price of $99, with no restrictions.

Here’s the kicker.

Apple: We would like to offer you our application wing wherein you would support and advance our collective application database.

Office, Final Cut, Logic… all of this would become Microsoft’s domain — software, as their name has always implied, and the core OS would become the domain of Apple.

I imagine Apple will continue selling hardware — after all, the best machine to run OSX on is an Apple machine (if Toyota designed the roads, you’d strongly consider buying a Toyota) — but software will be abandoned to satiate Microsoft, and OSX will become the new dominate OS.

Stay tuned =)