According to Apple's Dr. Ernest Prabhakar, the company will not be releasing an PC-compatible version of Mac OS X Server, the UNIX-based server operating system developed to compete with Windows NT Server. This comes as somewhat of a surprise, given the fact that Apple was talking up an Intel product since the OS was announced as Rhapsody a year and a half ago. As recently as December, I talked to someone in Apple's press relations who assured me that an Intel version was coming.
This decision will severely limit the number of people that have access to Apple's most impressive technology, since Mac OS X Server for PowerPC will run only on a small subset of PowerPC hardware. Whether Apple will continue work on the so-called "Yellow Box" APIs (an updated version of the old NextStep/OpenStep APIs) for Windows 9x and NT is unclear and, frankly, not even newsworthy. No one is interested in such a product. What people are interested in, however, is an advanced UNIX-based operating system with a hybrid Macintosh/OpenStep user interface. In a day and age where Linux is sweeping up in the media attention race, maybe Apple should have figured out that a lame "HAL" Super Bowl ad wasn't exactly the right decision. Neither was dropping the Intel version of Mac OS X Server and not telling anyone.
Another bozo maneuver from Cupertino: It's only a matter of time before we all stop caring
