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Daring Fireball Double Whammy

Gruber's last two posts are right on the money. First is his PR-speak to English translation of Quark's press release about QuarkXPress 6. Of note:

We are plowing full steam ahead under the delusion that our users want to use a print-oriented page-layout program for web design. By placing extra emphasis on these unwanted web features, we hope to distract your attention from a certain upstart page layout application, which is focused squarely and solely on page layout.

He really lays in to John C. Dvorak, though, on Dvorak's latest rants regarding Apple and Intel.

This point cannot be emphasized strongly enough. Apple is a computer hardware company. Selling hardware is how Apple generates most of its revenue. Their operating system software may well be the best aspect of their computers, but that does not make them a software company. Anyone who claims that Apple could simply switch to being a software company and make up for lost hardware revenue by selling additional software doesn't understand how the company operates. During the brief period of time when Apple licensed the Mac OS to other manufacturers, their revenue tanked. Too many people bought cheap clones from PowerComputing and Umax instead of higher-priced Macs from Apple, and the licensing revenue didn't compensate for the lost hardware revenue. The situation may well have been good for Mac users, but it was terrible for Apple's bottom line. No matter how badly people clamor for it, Apple is never going to release a version of Mac OS X that runs on standard Wintel PC hardware. Whether it's possible or not, it isn't going to happen. A frequent comment regarding this rumor is something like "I'd love a version of Mac OS X that ran on my PC." Sure you would, you cheap bastard. Apple's Switch campaign is an attempt to get PC users to buy thousands of dollars of Apple hardware, not hundreds of dollars of Apple software.

In addition, pay attention to the fact that Microsoft and Apple are indeed separate companies with separate goals, and thus should not be lumped in to the same industry "group" that analysts and reporters always lump the two in to.