"The idea that Apple would ditch its own OS for Microsoft Windows came to me from Yakov Epstein, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University, who wrote to me convinced that the process had already begun. I was amused, but after mulling over various coincidences, I'm convinced he may be right. This would be the most phenomenal turnabout in the history of desktop computing," writes PC Magazine columnist John C. Dvorak.
Dvorak predicted Apple moving to Intel chips before that happened, but Epstein's idea is so unlikely it's indistinguishable from wrong. The move to Intel was something Apple looked at repeatedly during its history and an idea that had internal support. The move to Windows was only given serious consideration once -- when Gil Amelio's second-in-command Ellen Hancock went to Redmond -- and as she told me at the time, it didn't make a lot of sense.
Way back then, Apple was trying to recover from its inability to write a proper desktop operating system and was shopping for one. The front runner was Be's BeOS, created under the direction of Jean-Louis Gassee after he left Apple to do it right*. But NT was also considered before Apple plumped for NeXT's NextStep (and also got the failing company's boss, Stephen P Jobs).
Apple bought NeXT for $402 million in December 1996, and NextStep became the basis of OS X, but it still took Apple around five years of hard graft to get the desktop version out. Apple might be able to move the user environment and apps to NT in less than five years, but why? You can argue that Intel chips are faster and cheaper, but it's hard to argue that NT is faster, cheaper and more robust than Free BSD. I don't think even Mr Jobs, the undisputed emperor of snake-oil salesmen, could manage that.
* Technically, Be OS was "the Amiga done right" but one of Gassee's incentives was dumping the historical crud in Mac OS.
(Charles Arthur adds: the Dvorak piece has been lampooned rather nicely by The Apple Blog, which is not - one might as well mention - anything to do with Apple the company, apart from being about it.)
