The Macintosh and AS/400 platforms have a lot in common: They both are more than 10 years old (the Mac was launched in 1984); they both are powered by IBM’s PowerPC microprocessor; they both represent superior alternative technology; they both claim a core group of rabid, loyal fans who are ready to sing the praises of their respective superior technology; and they both have critics who have predicted (incorrectly) their demise for years.
Not only is the Mac a great personal computing platform, but Apple’s flagship system is also poised to be a good bet as an AS/400 client platform.
Like the AS/400, the Mac is plagued by several myths that are seeming bred by Windows zombies who flow like lemmings to Redmond banks. Let’s look at some of those myths and then talk about how Microsoft’s recent moves may actually help make the Mac a better client system.
Myth #1: The Macintosh Is Slow
As I mentioned, the Macintosh is powered by the same PowerPC chips that are the heart of IBM’s RS/6000 and AS/400 line. Megahertz for megahertz, PowerPC chips use less power. They’re also smaller and faster than Pentium and Pentium II chips. To underscore the point, Apple published Adobe Photoshop benchmarks that showed the Macintosh with the PowerPC 750 (a.k.a. the G3) beat the Pentium II and its supposed media-enhanced MMX technology (read: great marketing, poor technology). This made Intel engineers irate, and they called Adobe to verify the results. When Adobe ran the tests, it found that Apple’s numbers were conservative; the speed gap was even wider than Apple had reported.
BYTE magazine’s BYTEmark rates the 266 MHz chip as being almost twice as fast as a 300 MHz Pentium II-based Compaq.
Myth #2: The Macintosh Is Expensive
While it is true that Apple has no Macs in the $800 to $1,200 range, Mac clone makers UMAX and Mactell have full systems based on the PowerPC 603e (roughly
equivalent to the Pentium) for $1,000. This system includes 24x CD-ROM, monitor, 32 MB of RAM, and other nice built-in Mac-standard features, like small computer system interface (SCSI), that cost extra on most PCs. If you want power, you can get a decked-out 233 MHz PowerPC G3 box for around $1,600. An equivalently powered (333 Mhz Pentium II with SCSI) and equipped Dell box (bundled with Microsoft Office) runs for $2,400.
Myth #3: The Mac Is Going to Die
Supposedly, the Mac doesn’t have enough market share to remain a viable platform. If you don’t have market share (according to myth), you don’t have developers making the applications that drive the platform. No applications, and your platform is dead. While you do need a healthy developer community to have a viable platform, market share is not the right measure of platform viability. Instead, consider installed base. Of the 28 or so million Macintoshes ever sold, around 21 million are still in use (I find that Macs have a longer lifespan, 3 to 4 years, than Wintel boxes have).
Suppose I am a software developer who produces a game with a $2 million budget. The average computer game is running around $35. Let’s say I can sell my game to 3 percent of the Mac market. I will gross around $21 million. That’s a decent return, and that is why there are more people developing for the Mac and more titles available than ever before.
The best example is Microsoft. My guess is that Office 98 (which shipped for the Mac in March) will end up being installed on 40 percent of all Macintoshes. It is going to cost around $500 for a copy and $200 for an upgrade, so let’s say Microsoft grosses around $250 per Mac copy sold. If successful, Microsoft could gross $2 billion an upgrade cycle for the Mac Office. Not bad for a dead platform.
No wonder Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple. There is money to be made on the Mac. In fact, I’d bet that, per machine, Microsoft makes more money on the Mac than on the PC because of low-margin OEM bundling.
Myth #4: The Macintosh Is Incompatible
The Macintosh can mount Novell NetWare, UNIX, and NT-based servers and can read DOS-formatted floppies, CD-ROMs, and Iomega zip disks. With a $75 emulator, like Insignia’s RealPC or Connectix Corporation’s VirtualPC, the Mac emulates the Pentium architecture and can run any Intel-based operating system (like Windows 95/NT, UNIX, or OS/2) and the programs that run on those operating systems.
So why is the Mac a safe bet for a client? Two words: the Internet and Java. The number one feature added to the top 100 AS/400 applications was Web-enablement. Add that to a slew of new products that allow access to AS/400 data via the browser, and you have a plethora of platform-independent applications.
The browser is the great equalizer. With a few dashes of Java Virtual Machine and HTML, it doesn’t matter if you are cooking with Windows, UNIX, NC, OS/2, or even the Mac OS.
You may be skeptical about Java because many people are speculating that Microsoft is going to make Java Windows-centric, in spite of Sun Microsystems’ desire to make Java a write-once-read-anywhere technology and several court cases over the matter. Actually, if Microsoft or Sun loses, Apple will still win. Microsoft and Apple are writing the Java
Virtual Machine for Macintosh together in complete compliance with both Microsoft’s and Sun’s flavor of Java—part of the $150 million deal Microsoft and Apple cut last year. That means that the Mac is going to have the most foolproof Java Virtual Machine around.
Add that Java strength with the Mac’s value, speed, and compatibility, and you might look again at the Mac for your client of choice for modern AS/400 applications.
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