Silicon Insider: Is Apple Poised to Topple the PC Big Boys?

Sept. 13, 2006 — -- In one of the strangest conjunctions of bad luck in the history of high tech, one of the world's largest industries -- personal computers -- suddenly seems up for grabs.

Let's go back a year.

At that time, PCs seemed the most stable of industries. It was filled with giants, all of them lumbering pleasantly along, squeezing profits that remained in an increasingly commodified marketplace.

On the Windows side, the big guns -- Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Sony et al -- were jostling around, competing against each other, picking up or losing a percentage of market share in desktops, and waiting for Microsoft to finally deliver Vista and make the game exciting again.

The whole "Wintel" world had grown stale and unimaginative.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Great Divide, Apple continued its long turnaround under Steve Jobs, consistently earning good press for quality new models.

Indeed, Apple was generating the only real excitement in the entire industry: The penumbra of excitement surrounding the iPod was converting a growing number of bored Windows users to switch to the Mac.

Still, these converts represented only a few percentage points in market share shift.

Looking back, everything suddenly changed with Apple's announcement that, 20 years late, it would finally begin offering Macintoshes with Intel microprocessors.

It was an important announcement, but certainly not as earthshaking as it would have been in 1986.

Yet the decision seemed to bring some kind of closure on the entire PC industry -- and in the process created some kind of strange attractor that has sewn chaos in the personal computing world ever since.

Don't ask me why -- I'm just reporting what has been unmistakable ever since.

The first thing that happened was Microsoft announced that it wouldn't hit its (second) target delivery date of Vista in October.

With that news, the last remaining faith the world had that Microsoft was still a dynamic and innovative company all but evaporated.

MS now suddenly looked old and confused. Meanwhile, the news was a gut shot to the Wintel world: The big PC makers had counted on the 2006 Christmas season to be a big revenue breakout.

Now they would have to stumble through with the same old product catalog. Scratch Microsoft.

Then, disaster struck. In one of the biggest product screw-ups in modern times, Sony, not only one of the world's biggest laptop computer makers but also a leading supplier of batteries to other laptop makers, shipped out millions of faulty batteries.

"Faulty," in this case, meaning: "Will burst into flames."

Thanks to the digital-camera boom, one of those exploding batteries got captured on tape … burning up not a Sony Vaio, which would have been justice, but a Dell laptop.

The image was literally burned into the minds of a billion viewers around the world.