One Microsoft Way - A Cookbook to Breaking the Windows Monopoly Without Breaking Windows - Thirteen years later
It has been about thirteen years since we published "One Microsoft Way - A Cookbook to Breaking the Windows Monopoly Without Breaking Windows"; we, nor the author, made any money on it, but it set off a firestorm in the computer and legal community.
The author was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, and his name appeared in the paper. It was a top best seller on Amazon for a few short weeks - it sold out of the limited quantity we printed - and then we did not do another press run.
Now thirteen years later, it appears the "cookbook" has worked. The book was really aimed at the CEO's of the computer world - mainly APPLE, and apparently it was read by the right people.
One of the first things that happened - as proffered in the book - was Apple dropped its Motorola platform for an Intel platform, and it asked the open source community for help adjusting Free BSD to be it's foundation for the next generation Mac OS, dubbed originally the "Darwin" project, it was a first of it's kind for a major corporation seeking help of volunteers under the company's standards - and they came in droves.
Now the MAC OS - also known as the MAC OSX, is actually a variant of UNIX, with the Apple Operating Environment on top of it, and it can be made to run Linux programs, Windows programs with WINE, Windows as operating system itself by hosting an X86 environment, and just a whole host of other goodies that Microsoft's Windows still can't - and never will be able to - do.
The MAC OS went through "Tiger" to "Leopard" and now to "Snow Leopard" which is version 10.6.3 at this writing.
More importantly, Apple has surpassed Microsoft in stock value and company worth and has shot Microsoft in terms of market capitalization and in doing so, has become the world’s biggest technology company.
In fact, the only American company valued higher is Exxon Mobil, with a market cap of $282 billion.
Anyhow, it’s official, Apple is now worth more than Microsoft. To put this in context, a decade ago when Ballmer became CEO, Microsoft MarketCap $556B, Apple’s $15.6B
Today, the Tortise has beat the Hare; and the turning point was a UNIX based OS.
Microsoft stock is selling at $25.75 and falling, and Apple stock is selling at $249 on May 26, 2010.
What's the author doing today? He's working on an energy solution that will break the oil monopolies without breaking oil, and another "cookbook" format book. Stay tuned.