A report from WWDC

My colleague Siddhartha Chadda is out at Apple’s WWDC this week and has this “man on the street” report:

The gasp of the audience when Steve Jobs said “it’s true” with the “e” hanging down to mimic Intel’s logo was a seminal event in computing. This is really the third major transition for Apple. And my opinion is that Steve Jobs made a compelling case for this transition. This time it is when Macintosh as a platform is very strong. Most people don’t change much if they are strong and it really is a bold new direction for Apple to do at this particular time and space.

One can make the case for a race between Longhorn and Mac OS X (Leopard) on Intel by late 2006.

Going to some of the labs at WWDC and seeing stock Intel motherboards in a G5 powermac chassis is so freaky not because of the Frankenstein aspect but how matter of fact the developer community has embraced this new path.

There are labs with 75 G5′s with each alternative row of computers with nice shiny brass combination locks in the back. These are the only hints that you are running OS X on a Pentium motherboard.

People want stuff to work. They don’t care about what CPU is in there. This announcement is absent from Apple home page as a major link because they still want to sell Power PCs. And frankly a person looking to surf the web, write an email and store photographs can’t care about endianess and other technological hurdles and developers just care about solving technical problems on a platform that allows them limitless possibilities.

It’s going to be a very interesting two years for Apple.