A world where every Apple has Intel inside will be very different to the one on Microsoft's road maps

Apple is the most successful failure in the business. It can create multi-billion dollar markets from nowhere. It has unrivaled brand recognition, and an extremely strong case for arguing that OS X is the finest desktop operating system in common use. Yet its market share of PC hardware is slipping away. People might aspire to Powerbooks and Mac minis, but they do not buy them. The benchmark that matters is the thickness of the wallet after purchase, and here Apple cannot compete. Apple cannot be Dell.

But Apple could be Microsoft -- at least in the domestic market. Despite Microsoft's effective monopoly, Redmond has conspicuously failed to lock in the home. Everyone runs Windows because that's what comes on their cheap hardware, but all of the attempts to force ordinary users into an MSN-centric, Passport controlled, Active X mediated world have failed. In fact, consumer exposure has contaminated the Microsoft brand: viruses, trojans and spyware are seen as uniquely Windows experiences.

For all that, though, Apple has to compete on price. It can't do that on hardware: the economies of scale are tipped far too heavily against it for any amount of engineering brilliance to help. But it can most certainly do that on software. It has a superior product, superior image and superior consumer nous. A switch to Intel architecture creates a level playing field where those superiorities can be directly employed and Apple's suite of great consumer software - iLife, Garage Band, and the rest -- gets millions more potential customers.

It is possible of course to have Intel-based products that are not PC compatible. Apple could manage the transition almost invisibly, taking higher hardware margins while maintaining its separateness. It is far more exciting to envisage a world where when you buy a £500 Dell online, you get to tick a box that says "Apple OS, please". As for Longhorn: demonstrations of the pre-beta product have been as thrilling as a tour of a Basingstoke call centre. If it is hatched into a consumer environment where Apple is already rampant, it will be gobbled up like an ugly ducking in a lake of alligators.

"Roll up this map of Europe", said William Pitt as Napoleon rampaged across the continent. "It will not be needed these ten years hence". It is too soon to say whether the marketing cartographers behind Microsoft's Longhorn roadmap will feel that way about Apple, but history is certainly being made.

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