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Then Gates' smug smile blossomed on that vast Orwellian screen (a Stalinesque edifice uncannily resembling the one that got shattered in the famous first Mac ad in 1984), and the Microsoft leader regaled the Apple masses with his boundless affection for the operating system (OS) whose commercial viability he had spent much of his adult life systematically undermining. "We think Apple makes a huge contribution to the computer industry," Gates assured the room, respectfully observing the taboo against speaking ill of the dead--or, ahem, the gravely ailing. Let's put it this way: you sure didn't hear...
...that long. And Apple cultists don't need much encouragement to stay psyched. "Macintosh customers have proved to be incredibly stubborn," says Roger McNamee, co-founder of the high-tech investment firm Interval Partners, "and where there are stubborn customers, there is hope." Sales of the recently released Mac OS 8, for instance, the first major Mac update in a decade, have been four times Apple's expectations. And the company can still point to considerable leads in the education and graphics arenas...
...view is grim. A decade of bungled opportunities and misguided investments has left Apple in an intractable negative spiral: lower market share means fewer developers, which means less software, which means fewer customers, which means still lower market share. Not pretty. Even the belated decision to license the Mac OS to clonemakers only drained Apple of hardware revenue...
...unclear. Build low-cost network computers? Split up into hardware and software siblings? Or just rely on next year's expected release of the post-Mac operating system, Rhapsody, based on Jobs' NeXT technology, which Apple shelled out $424 million for last winter? True believers call Rhapsody the greatest OS ever and Apple's savior (Tim Berners-Lee did invent the Web on it); skeptics call NeXT a marketplace failure and an albatross Apple should have left around Steve Jobs' neck. Regardless, it's hard--very, very hard--to see any OS other than Windows--probably the powerful NT version...
...likely future of Internet content." Ditto Apple's technology patents, which under the new cross-licensing agreement will go from causing endless litigation (the Mac faithful will surely consider Microsoft's undisclosed payment to Apple to settle infringement claims de facto proof that Gates knows he stole their OS) to becoming weapons for Microsoft coders to wield when the time comes...