Does The Mac Still Matter? The financial world is clearly happy with the recent Microsoft "investment" in Apple Computer. Apple's stock is up. Some of the business press is casting Bill Gates in the role of savior. Others see the investment as an effort to preserve Microsoft's lucrative Macintosh software market.

But what the deal was really about is covering Microsoft's flank. Microsoft needs Apple-a weak, but still breathing Apple. A weaker company would have been more susceptible to takeover attempts or other overtures from the likes of Sun Microsystems or Oracle, thus giving either of those companies a loyal base of desktop users and a lot of ammunition with which to go after Microsoft. A stronger Apple could carve out its own niche in the Internet and distributed computing market, and threaten Microsoft's dominance on other fro nts.

So the investment was enough to keep Apple alive, while extracting a deal that considerably strengthens Microsoft's position in the industry while essentially neutralizing Apple.

The agreement by Apple to distribute Microsoft's Internet Explorer as its primary browser and coordinate Java development with Microsoft is a serious blow to Sun, Oracle, and the rest of the Java-network computer contingent. Apple has essentially become yet another platform for Microsoft's effort to hijack the Java language away from Sun and thus dominate the Internet development market.

From an enterprise computing perspective, that's all that really matters. The Mac OS has been a "niche platform" in enterprise computing-that is to say, a bit player-because it failed to provide to corporate developers what Microsoft provided: a set of corporate-strength development tools.

Despite all the promise of Apple's OpenDoc object architecture, Apple never gave users a rapid application development tool that made effect ive use of OpenDoc components in the way Microsoft's Visual Basic made use of Windows object models. There were third-party RAD tools on the Mac-such as Powersoft's PowerBuilder-but they were always available first on Windows.

The best parts of the interface of Microsoft Windows 95 and Windows NT were appropriated from the Mac OS-the folders, the desktop, the trash can, and the Start menu (which looks suspiciously like the Apple Menu that the Mac OS has had for years) are all rip-offs. Now with multiple monitor support and other improvements coming in Windows 98, the last of the major interface innovations of the Mac have been absorbed by the Microsoft mother ship. With its interface stolen, its application development course being set from outside, and its market fragmented, does the Macintosh still matter? It may live on, but Apple's own maneuvers have made the Mac irrelevant.

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