[dconti]

Totally agree. There is a huge cost to supporting hardware combinations and a huge perception problem that it generates (what if mac osx takes 3 seconds longer to resume on a given hardware platform? what impact does that have on their image?)

Also what about the software maintenance costs? Right now Apple has all sorts of shortcuts they can take with servicing because they have < 15% share, low penetration in enterprise, etc. The costs on that will go way up if their share increases dramatically.

I think the problem with articles like this is they come from this altruistic "osx seems nice so it should be everywhere" idea. This is exactly the idea that has made life hard for windows - that it must support a huge software and hardware ecosystem, and it must work everywhere, and MS must pay the costs associated with that.

And at the end of the day MS makes less money per PC sold than Apple makes per Mac.