Dell Would Sell OS X
David Kirkpatrick reporting for Fortune, notes that in email correspondence, Michael Dell said, "If Apple decides to open the Mac OS to others, we would be happy to offer it to our customers."
Although, neither Apple nor Steve Jobs have indicated that they have any interest in opening OS X up to non-Apple-branded hardware, this admission by Dell is a rather huge boon for Apple. Up until this point, no large player in the PC world has gone on record saying that they would run OS X on their boxes if Apple opened up the platform. Considering that Dell is such a large player in the personal computing arena, if Steve Jobs were to decide to allow for this, most likely other PC manufacturers would follow suit, and there *could* be a chance of Apple challenging the Microsoft-dominated world of personal PCs.
Then again, if Apple were to do this, it would be a rather huge gamble and running OS X on multiple slightly different pieces of hardware would entail a lot of driver compatibility, which in my opinion is one of the many difficulties and weak spots with Windows XP. OS X running on more varied systems means more software support for drivers for different PC devices and could quite quickly become a big point of instability in what until now has remained a rather tightly reigned and controlled operating system.
What do you think? Should Steve and Michael sit down and have a talk?
