It’s not every day you read a blog post predicting the “biggest announcement in the computer industry in the last decade or two”.
In his post Windows applications on Macs without Windows George Silverman at Word of Mouth is predicting that Windows applications will now run natively on Macs and that Steve Jobs will announce this at MacWorld on Tuesday, 9 January.
Here are my predictions: Next week, on Tuesday, January 9th at MacWorld, Steve Jobs will announce that the new Mac operating system called Leopard, OS X 10.5, will directly run Windows applications without needing Windows. That’s right, you will be able to install and run any Windows program directly into the Mac without having a copy of Windows on the machine!
According to George it’s likely that Mac has “the best word of mouth of any present product”, so coupled with this new capability a monster is about to be unleashed.
I further predict that this will produce the biggest word-of-mouth blowout in history. Combine the pent up positive word of mouth of the Mac with the negative word of mouth toward Microsoft, Windows, the Windows PC makers like Dell, viruses, adware, spyware, malware, etc. and you have an explosive combination. This will be the most interesting test in years of the unleashing of word of mouth. It will demonstrate to the entire marketing community what happens when you follow my marketing approach of Blockbusting: find the decision blocks, bust ’em up, and you will see exponential growth.
…To my knowledge, I’m the only one predicting the landslide success of Mac in the next year. It probably won’t be immediate, but as the snowball gains momentum, it will grow exponentially…
…By the way, I was among the first to predict that a way would be found to get Windows to work on the then-new Intel Mac. It caused a lot of WOM among the tech savvy and a lot of sales, but not among the corporate people who would have to use it seamlessly at work. Now they can. Now we’ll find out that a lot of corporate IT people have Macs at home.
This announcement also caught my interest for personal reasons because I had to work on Macs for years and love using them. But I’ve always had a PC at home purely for convenience. So if George is right, I’ll definitely be making the switch at home!
And if he is right, won’t the next 12 months be interesting as we all watch the power of WOM at work.
It’s just after 10pm on Tuesday evening as I write this, which means America is just rising to greet the new day. So let’s see what happens.
