Apple goes with Intel: anticipating the other shoe and looking ahead

Apple announced today that they had been anticipating the move to Intel from the moment Steve Jobs returned to the company with a version of the OS ready to make the move. To the Apple loyalist, this has to come as a massive blow; during all of this time Steve and Apple have been adamant that the PowerPC was vastly better than the x86. Had any of them read the recent unauthorized biography, iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business, they likely would have been able to better anticipate this and subsequent moves.

Steve wants desperately to take Bill Gates's position as the most powerful technology guy on the planet. He can't get there with Apple (or actually with any hardware), which suggests that the "Other Shoe" will eventually be the move away from PC hardware into a software-only pure play. This would allow him to enjoy similar margins to what Microsoft enjoys and, as he believes (and has often demonstrated), he has a better idea of what users want in a product than Microsoft does.

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