John Dvorak writes, Apple will benefit as it can now champion its design and aesthetic strategies in the world of Intel and allow people preferring the Windows OS to actually buy a Macintosh for its design and run Windows on it. It's quite possible that this new Apple strategy while obviously harmful to Microsoft somewhat could actually be most dangerous to the emerging Linux OS environment & This could kill Linux and in some ways actually benefit Microsoft in the long term.
The Mac OS was built around a Unix kernel not unlike Linux, but with a very advanced and slick user interface. The normal Apple menu structures and way of doing things are what the majority of both Mac and Windows users expect to see. The Linux world suffers from a lack of modern intuitive menus and commands. Users of the Open Office Programs such as the Powerpoint clone called "Impress" soon finds themselves lost in a jungle of menu structures and naming conventions. These stem from old Unix roots and none of the Unix-trained Linux users find it peculiar or difficult. In fact, they cannot even recognize these problems. Part of the reason that Linux has not broken onto the desktop is because of these old Unix roots. As Linux is free,useful and powerful, it should have made a bigger impact on the desktop market than it has. There are obviously some problems –noticed similarly in Solaris and other pure Unix operating systems. This includes the BSD-Unix to which Apple simply added modern user interface concepts. Linux has other problems too. It's likely that developer interest will wane when Apple is fully engaged on the X86 platform. While Apple ran on the PowerPC chip the amount of developer effort in the Open Source camps was nil. But now that Apple is using the same processor as everyone else, targeting the Macs will now be an easy decision to make. This will be at the expense of Linux.
There are numerous developers who simply do not subscribe to the notions of the Open Source Foundation and its rigid licensing requirements. They will quickly see profit opportunities for OS-X/86 development. It seems that Linux has the most to lose. Linux was the only X86 alternative to Microsoft and now it has both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to contend with. Tough road ahead for Linux in the desktop and potentially enteprise segment - the ray of hope for Linux could be the mobile segment which is seeing explosive growth in sales and provides wide range of applications.
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