billpalmer.net

Have we reached halftime of the Mac renaissance?

Oh gosh dear gee, have I gone and done what I said I wasn't going to do? How many weeks has it been since I've written about the Mac? Where does the time go? Or more accurately, where did the subject matter go? Is this entire first paragraph going to be nothing but questions?

Yep, I guess so. I've always said that writer's block is not a lack of words, but a lack of subject matter. However you define it, I seem to have contracted it this year, at least when it comes to the Mac. I look around the Mac web, though, and I'm far from the only one. Too many good Mac sites just aren't offering up content like they used to, and it leads to the question: is it over? Is there nothing else to write? It seems all that needed to be said about how the Mac got to this point has already been said. No more history lessons needed. We're in the present now, but it's one in which there simply isn't much happening. Nah, let me rephrase that, there's plenty happening. MacOS X has stabilized into a nearly perfect operating system, the software that comes with it has become a dazzling embarrassment of riches, and there are more and more new Mac users every day.

But how do you write about that? A year or two ago, there was so much angst out there, so much fear, controversy, misinformation. And if you go back a year or two prior to that, there were actual things to worry about. It seems the further back you look, the worse things were for this platform, and thus the easier it was to find source material. But now what? Movies end because they've reached the point where you know the characters you care about are going to live happily ever after. The story doesn't keep going just to cover the minute day-in day-out details of the happily ever after, because there would be no suspense in it.

Much as the scenario seems to fit the circumstances, though, I don't think the Mac web is a movie nearing its ending. And I don't think we're headed for a sequel, either. Sequels are about the next time the characters you care about stop living their happily ever after long enough to run into future troubles and drum up another story worth telling in the process. I don't think we need the Mac to falter and rebound in order for the Mac web to make a comeback. Certainly you would hope it wouldn't come to that, and I don't think it'll happen anyway. At this point the Mac is just too well-positioned for things to suddenly go monumentally south overnight. Let's not forget that the sudden "crisis" that the Mac faced in the mid to late nineties was more than a dozen years in the making, with its roots all the way back in the head of a soda company forcing Steve Jobs out the first time. So if the current CEO of Pepsi comes along this year and forces Steve out again, then we can look for the Mac to be right back in crisis land by the year 2020 -- a bit too save the Mac web if it's going to lie dormant in the mean time.

We're not done, though, I swear it. I actually found the right metaphor earlier this week when the Miami Dolphins were introducing their new quarterback in Daunte Culpepper, who remarked that he felt as if his career had reached halftime and he looked forward to getting the second half underway. The metaphor might work a little more smoothly for him because "halftime" is a football term and he actually plays football, but I believe it's an apt way to describe the current state of the Mac web nonetheless. Or more accurately, we've reached halftime of the renaissance of the Macintosh platform itself.

The fear, uncertainty, and doubt of the first half of the Mac renaissance have been largely washed away, and so the first half of the game has come to and end. The second half of the renaissance will begin when everyone's using a Mac (and by "everyone" I mean twenty or thirty percent of the people out there) and we're talking about a mainstream enough of a platform that there will be entirely different ways to look at and examine things, different things to talk about. I can't quite put my finger on just what the second half of the game will look like, but I do know it's going to be a lot of fun to write about. The way the iPod is a cultural phenomenon right now? That's what the Mac will be in a few years. Except the Mac will be bigger, because there's so much more you can do with it, so many more opportunities for it to change your life.

We'll be there soon enough. With the platform seeing forty percent year over year growth, you can do your own math on how quickly things are going to grow, and make your own projections on when that growth will be sufficient to put us into the second half of the game. In the mean time, we might as well enjoy halftime. Our team may have started the game with an insurmountable lead, but heading into halftime things have somehow managed to turn sharply in our team's favor. Best get your bathroom breaks and your dog walking out of the way now, because the second half kickoff will be here before you know it.