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Dell will not be licensing OS X
As revealed in a recent Fortune article by David Kirkpatrick, Michael Dell has indicated that he would be interested in bundling OS X with his PCs.
This story has generated quite the buzz over the past few days and seems to have turned into "big news" with regards to where Apple's future may lie. Regardless, where Apple's future does not lie is in the realm of licensing OS X for use on standard PCs—Dell or any other brand. Apple is a hardware company. They have put a great deal of resources into the development and evolution of Mac OS X and a variety of application software, but it is all in an effort to sell hardware. In the early 90s, Apple allowed other companies to clone the Macintosh and license the operating system and it almost killed them. If given the choice, most consumers would buy a cheaper Dell running OS X before a Macintosh, despite any technical superiority that may be present in the Apple hardware. Not to mention the fact that OS X's stability would be compromised by the need to support a wide range of differing PC configurations.
It won't happen.
Unable to select DBSo I emailed Michael Dell, now the company's chairman, and asked if he'd be interested in the Mac OS, assuming that Apple CEO Steve Jobs ever decides to license it to PC companies. (For now, Jobs says he won't.)
"If Apple decides to open the Mac OS to others, we would be happy to offer it to our customers," Dell wrote in an email. It's the first time any PC industry executive has openly shown enthusiasm for selling machines with Apple's software. Though that's all Dell would say for the record, I suspect his interest is not unknown to Jobs. So, as I said in this column last week, the ball is in Jobs' court.
"If Apple decides to open the Mac OS to others, we would be happy to offer it to our customers," Dell wrote in an email. It's the first time any PC industry executive has openly shown enthusiasm for selling machines with Apple's software. Though that's all Dell would say for the record, I suspect his interest is not unknown to Jobs. So, as I said in this column last week, the ball is in Jobs' court.
This story has generated quite the buzz over the past few days and seems to have turned into "big news" with regards to where Apple's future may lie. Regardless, where Apple's future does not lie is in the realm of licensing OS X for use on standard PCs—Dell or any other brand. Apple is a hardware company. They have put a great deal of resources into the development and evolution of Mac OS X and a variety of application software, but it is all in an effort to sell hardware. In the early 90s, Apple allowed other companies to clone the Macintosh and license the operating system and it almost killed them. If given the choice, most consumers would buy a cheaper Dell running OS X before a Macintosh, despite any technical superiority that may be present in the Apple hardware. Not to mention the fact that OS X's stability would be compromised by the need to support a wide range of differing PC configurations.
It won't happen.