IBM Corp doesn’t seem to have taken at all kindly to suggestions that the only real market for PowerPC-based personal computers will be as Macintosh clones, and late on Tuesday went out of its way to stress that it had no plans whatsoever to fit the machines it builds to the new common standard with Mac OS ROMs. Since after a process that made drawing teeth easy, Apple Computer Inc finally confirmed that Mac OS would be sold retail and shrinkwrapped and that it would make it easy for anyone that wanted them to buy the Mac OS ROMs to plug them into any PowerPC-standard machine that did not already have them, IBM’s declaration simply implies that its own machines will be the least attractive Mac clones on the market. It can be expected that all other serious builders of machines to the standard will put the ROMs into the slots at manufacture, and that most will pre-load MacOS. And given the paucity of sales of Windows NT on Alpha and R-series RISC, the market for NT on PowerPC seems extremely limited, and anyone really wanting OS/2 seems likely to go for the iAPX-86 version, the outlook for IBM’s machines looks poor.
