Jobs targets Generation M at Work

Thanks to Steven Johnson for pointing out Daring Fireball’s post on this.

There are a zillion analysts out there telling me what Boot Camp means and why.

And most of them, in the end, tell me why they think Steve Jobs has got it wrong again.

But not John Gruber, the person behind DaringFireball. His analysis is the first that makes sense to me, that puts forward a hypothesis that I can understand. And even better, he pointed me at Gavin Shearer’s post and to Chris Clark’s.

For those who don’t want to bother reading all the links, here’s the summary:

• Boot Camp is not an Apple versus Microsoft play. Today.
• It allows the high-end techies that swear by Apple to have access to Windows on an oh-well-if-they-must basis.
• That alone makes it worth it, if it means taking even one percentage point off Windows’ share.
• But it’s more beautiful than that. Given the Intel move, first off it allows Apple to jump in on the high-end PC market big time. This is a hardware play.
• It gets better. What Leopard (or possibly its successor) will do is ring-fence Vista within an OSX environment…and do so not in dual-boot mode but as quality virtualisation. This is an everything play.
  

I buy these arguments in principle. The plan for Intel followed by BootCamp followed by Leopard and by virtualisation-meeting-coolth makes sense to me. I can even see XBox beginning to sweat a little.
The bit I’m adding?

This is all about Jobs taking the iPod halo into the enterprise.

Tomorrow’s enterprise.

Staffed by tomorrow’s people. Generation M.

You see, they’re too young to know that nobody got fired for buying Microsoft. Far too young to know that nobody got fired for buying IBM. Guess what they’re going to buy if son-of-Leopard is around?