Jaguar vs. Longhorn: The Rematch
While Steve Jobs and Bill Gates may both say the desktop wars are over, don't try telling that to the legions of Windows and Mac partisans hanging around the Web.
Kindled by these advocates' smoldering passions, our recent column on the prospects of Apple's and Microsoft's next major OS revs had the effect of tossing a kitchen match on a pile of oily rags.
Since the resulting flare-up seems to have generated more heat than light on some message boards focused on the companies' platform prospects, we thought it was worth restating our basic premise: If both companies accomplish most of the competitive feats they're contemplating for their next major OS upgrades, Mac OS X will be running a couple of years ahead of Windows by next fall.
Specifically, some readers took issue with what they described as an apples-and-oranges comparison between the Panther version of Mac OS X (a k a Version 10.3 and due to reach developers in June and end users this fall) and the Longhorn upgrade to Windows (which won't ship until 2005). But that's precisely the point: If Apple sticks to a yearly cycle of product updates between now and 2005, it will be going on Mac OS X 10.5 by the time Longhorn delivers GUI enhancements and other features designed to take on Mac OS X 10.2. Even if Redmond comes through with all of the capabilities it's predicting, it will still be choking on dust kicked up by an additional couple of Mac OS X revs.
The other major argument we encountered—especially from Mac boosters—was the contention that we'd somehow underestimated the capabilities of Mac OS X when enumerating areas where Apple is seeking to match Windows XP.
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