Apple touted the first intel Macs as a machine that was best of the three worlds, it wasn’t because they had the best operating system (which I’d argue they do), but it was because the machines ran OS X, Linux/Unix, and Windows. All three, on one device. Heck, if you really want to get down to the nuts and bolts of it all, Apple plugged Windows in an attempt to get traditional beige box users to check out Apple’s products. Why couldn’t Microsoft do the same thing? That picture from the Cult of Mac could be the perfect marketing tool for Microsoft. “5 out of 7 Journalists are using a Mac, but how many of them are also running Windows 7 on their Machine?” I’d be willing to bet that a large majority of them have a virtual machine with Windows running on their laptops. - Joshua Schnell

that's just it tho, since Apple moved from PPC to intel machines, MS automatically supported them. Tho NT is built on the ability to run on different architectures - HAL (or Hardware Abstraction Layer) was designed for this very purpose and is how NT was capable of running on alpha based processors (the RISC CPU from Compaq) and on the Itanium (the totally 64bit chip from intel, which struggled because of it being expensive and not providing the performance unless you specifically build your software for it). MS didn't need to do anything really... Apple did it for them by switching to off the shelf Intel hardware. - alphaxion

tho MS market driods have been very poor in pointing any of this out. Sometimes I think I'd make a fortune if I applied to work for the MS marketing team ;) - alphaxion

alphaxion, maybe we should storm Redmond together. ;) - Joshua Schnell