In terms of the level of importance, this would be ù in this space ù the same thing as Apple announcing they were going to be using Intel processors,
There are a lot of tech companies in the Bay Area that are setting the pace. Apple is on a major upswing and Hewlett-Packard is doing well in printers and visual technologies, and giving Dell a run for its money in personal computers.
The big unanswered question in the market is whether Apple hardware could successfully sell with Windows on it, and by successful, I mean be competitive to a degree that it could grow Apple's hardware share massively.
No vendor other than Apple has really stepped up to the combination of design, marketing and user experience that is required by this segment.
We already know when consumers don't buy in the fourth quarter, they don't come back in the first quarter. This has created a market opportunity that is unprecedented for Apple if they can execute.
The expectation on the iPod is that HP's version will probably outsell Apple's version relatively quickly.
This gives Apple the biggest competitive advantage they've had in history from Microsoft.
This Unix component is working against them. It's basically Unix with an Apple front end, but from the administrators' point of view, all they see is Unix.
It's very critical to Apple that they get this .NET blessing, otherwise they're going to get forced out of the corporate network.