As it is well known, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch (especially in downtown Seattle, where even the water is overpriced) and this is no exception. For Apple's end of the deal, they will be bundling Internet Explorer 4 with MacOS (which, as someone recently commented, seems like a nane that's just a tad too technical for an operating system that's supposed to be user friendly. We can only wonder how many tech support calls have come in to Apple from users wondering what the "OS" stands for in MacOS...) This, of course, isn't going to make Netscape very happy. As most people know, IE is already a shovelware throw-in with retail copies of Windows95, and this means that the only way to avoid having Internet Explorer thrown in like a "do you want fries with that?" that won't go away is to go buy some off-the-wall operating system that takes a pile of manuals to figure out (and even then, you'll have to use Lynx as your Web browser... If you can figure out how to compile the binaries for your machine.) And given the average intelligence level of the lusers that are snatching up semi computer-like devices left and right, this isn't very bloody likely.
From what I have seen of the IE4 betas so far, these things will eat one's hard disk for breakfast and come back for seconds, using your RAM to pick it's virtual teeth with afterwards if they are given the chance to do so. By it's very nature, IE4 is a pretty invasive program, replacing the entire desktop shell for better integration with the web browser (which never was a really good interface in the first place) but it changes the file managment aspects of the shell in ways that can be disorienting, most notably with a single click opening fines, as opposed to a traditional double-click. The Shell integration mode in IE4 is installed as a default, although it can be turned off. Still, I have yet to see IE4 on the Mac, but I suspect that it will replace the shell on the Mac in a similar way. All in all, Netscape is not going to have a very easy run of things if IE has already taken over the system. When one considers that Microsoft's mission statement reads "A computer on every desktop running Microsoft software" we begin to realize that they are going to make sure that nobody escapes their software... Sure it is true that Netscape Navigator/Communicator/whatever they're calling that browser thingy they're making these days will install just fine on a system running IE4 (apparently someone tested it,) but Microsoft probably doesn't want you to know that.
Of course, no radical conspiracy theory would be complete without the other side having a hidden agenda, so I think I can make one up here... For years, Microsoft and Apple have been fighting each other over who really came up with this whole GUI thing in the first place (Which makes one wonder if anyone out there from Xerox PARC circa the late seventies has anything to say about this whole mess.) Sure Apple may have been the first to come up with a halfway-practical (well, maybe about 26.5% practical, but that's a lot harder to say, and besides, it seems like ages since I took a math class anyway) implementation of a GUI on their system, but for some strange reason, Microsoft has ended up with a whole lot more users than Apple. One of my inside sources over at MS (don't ask me how I ended up with inside sources, because I am not quite sure myself) suggest that Apple is trying to figure out how in the heck Microsoft pulled that one off. Apparently, sone of the programmers at Apple are itching to take a look at some of Microsoft's NT source code to figure out how they managed to pull of the multitasking so well (when the lack of true preemptive multitasking is still something that a lot of people tend to complain a lot about.) Of course, mind you, this is all a bunch of wild speculation at this point, but this is likely what will happen with this whole deal. Eventually, the time will come when the PC users are claiming that MacOS is becoming nothing more than a cheap knock-off Windows, then Apple will continue to insist that Windows is a cheap knock-off of MacOS, and a quick trip to the software store will reveal that neither of these is cheap, which will really make this whole thing sound ridiculous.
Meanwhile, Apple has beguin a recent crackdown on Mac cloners (as to why anyone would want to clone something that is barely even a computer in the first place would probably take a few weeks of experiments in Sledgehammer Labs, and we're still cleaning up after the angry mobs that came last time we got to messing around like that over in the lab.) Apparently, they don't like the fact they went off and begun selling their computers with MacOS 8 preinstalled without a licensing agreements that Apple has to offer (or hasn't even offered yet.) Perhaps one of these days, Apple will realize that the fact that all of these years that they have kept their platform so proprietary that they get all of the market share for the Mac to themselves, but that the market share they got ended up being 100% of nearly nothing. It has been speculated that if Apple had decided to license MacOS (or whatever the freakin' thing was called back then... I'd go ask my dinosaur, if it weren't for the fact that he's been extinct for years, and also if it weren't for the fact that he probably has a brain the size of a walnut, which still would place him in the top 20th percentile of the average computer user's intelligence level) back in the late eighties, it is entirely possible that we'd all be using Macs by now, and Windows users would be just another vocal lunatic fringe extolling the virtues of having a mouse with more than one button... Kinda' like the rabid Mac advocates are today.
Still, the fact remains that the raging egos that have run Apple for all this time are about to be deflated by a rapid-fire harpoon gun trained right at one infinite loop. And one would think that they could have saw it coming too. For years, they have been acting like Bill and his crew should be bowing down before them. At this point, they have found out that their little marketing strategy hasn't been all it was cracked up to be in the first place. Now if you'll excuse me, the music is starting again. This time I'm sure I'll get a seat on Apple's Board of Directors...