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Would OS X for PCs be good business for Apple?

As some of you may be aware, it is possible to run Apple's Mac OS X operating system on regular PCs. Apple's licensing agreement currently does not permit this but its viability has been amply demonstrated (search for "OS X on x86"). The conventional wisdom is that Apple doesn't want to start licensing it's OS X / Mac operating system for PCs because they make a lot of money selling high margin Macintosh hardware and an OS X for PCs would cannibalize this. This analysis will show that there is potential to generate in excess of USD 3 billion in additional income for Apple, nearly doubling its latest income figures.

Let us start by assuming a USD 100 price tag for each home license. Based on OS X's simplicity, ease of use, superior features and "Mac halo" this is a realistic price when compared to Microsoft's Vista offering.

Let's assume that Apple is able to convert 3% or 30 million of the installed base of 1 billion PCs every year, that would add 3 billion dollars in revenue annually.

Is "Internet Domain Estate" worth it?

NameMedia just filed for an IPO (filing). They are looking to raise upto $172.5 million based on the initial filing. Potential investors will soon have to find answers to the big question of how valuable "Internet Domain Estate" really is. The real estate (real world) market is in a crisis right now after a prolonged period of ever increasing valuations. Is this a harbinger of things to come for Internet domain estate as well? Let's first take a look at where the value of real estate (real world) comes from and we will then analyse whether this applies to so called internet domain estate as well.

Myspace committing to Google's OpenSocial

The story is getting more and more interesting for developers of internet applications: Myspace is joining Google's OpenSocial API camp according to Silicon Alley and confirmed by TechCrunch. Social networkers Bebo and Six Apart are also joining the alliance as are Oracle and Sales Force. It now looks like a large number of major players in the social networking and Internet arena are teaming up to ensure that Facebook does not end up with a lock-up on the developers of social networking applications. They want to ensure that Facebook doesn't become the Net's operating system in alliance with Microsoft.

Will they succeed? The software industry has had its fair share of similar alliance, but I am trying to hard to remember a really successful one. Is anything going to be different this time?

Google raises the bar for Email again

After all the hoopla surrounding the launch of its OpenSocial API (see my recent post), Google has also significantly upgraded their Gmail offering, demonstrating once again how they are working hard to extend and retain their online community.

The Gmail upgrade includes the following significant new features:

  • IMAP access to gmail
  • a storage upgrade, almost doubling the capacity to 4.5 GB

Google has addressed the shortcomings of its POP3 implementation for its Gmail service in a very elegant way. You can now synchronize your folders with Gmail using IMAP, which a very comfortable paradigm to process email. Multiple clients can synchronize different "folders", including Gmail's labels, which act as a kind of virtual folder system. I am not aware of any large free email provider offering IMAP - it usually comes as an additional paid service.

The storage upgrade of course speaks for itself and in this age of multimedia is likely to be attractive to most people. Plus one can really use Gmail as an archive / backup and not have to worry about backups otherwise.

Google's Open Interface for Social Networks

On Thursday, 1 November, 2007 Google
will be announcing their "OpenSocial" API for social networks. This
will be a standard API developers of third party applications for
social networks will be able to use, provided the social network
platform enables it. It will mean that 3rd party developers will be
able to deploy their Google API standard application on all platforms
supporting it.

But which networks are planning to support it? Of course Google's own Orkut will support it. GigaOm reports that XING, Ning, hi5, LinkedIn, Plaxo and Friendster are
on board and will be supporting it. This means that OpenSocial is going
to be interesting for developers of external social networking
applications, because they will be able to cover a significant
population of social networkers.

There are a lot of questions that start coming up: