How The Game Is Played

My Biggest Fear

I promised in yesterday's Blog that I would share with you my biggest fear in the consumer space. Here it is.

There is a juggernaut barreling down its tracks aimed right at consumer computing. And it scares me that no one seems to have noticed. Certainly I haven't heard anyone else talking about it . That Juggernaut is owned by IBM and its called PowerPC.

For a long time now IBM has been entrenching PowerPC in the embedded space. A great many set top boxes run on PPC. We even use a PPC as the administration processor on one of our own AMD based server boxes. All for the same reason-- they are cheap. And the more they get used, the higher the volumes IBM can make them in, and the cheaper they become.

What really caught my attention though was this. Every next generation video game console is PPC based. Gamecube was already PPC and the assumption is Nintendo's next box, Revolution, will be too. Sony's much vaunted “cell processor” in their PS3 is, by all reports, just a multi-core PPC with a couple of extra vector processors thrown onto the die. And scariest of all, XBox2 is Power PC based.

Why is this scary? Because Microsoft has tipped their hand and announced that they intend a version of XBox2 that also has all of their MediaPC functionality. Written right there between the lines is this-- Microsoft is porting XP to the PPC. They have to in order to meet that goal. By the time they are done enabling all their Media software they will have virtually all of XP on that platform.

So lets play what-if for a minute, What if Microsoft has decided that they don't like being tied at the hip to Intel and intends to offer PowerPC XP based computers? “That'll never work”, is the answer I usually hear when I suggest this, “what about the legacy apps?”

Well, I thought Microsoft might have the guts to brave this anyway... and then I realized just recently they won't have to. They already own a technical solution to that problem. About a year ago they bought, lock stock and barrel, a company that makes a product that allows Intel software to run on PowerPC. A darling of the Apple community, the product is called “VirtualPC” (http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/virtualpc/virtualpc.aspx?pid=virtualpc).

This seemed an odd purchase at the time and many guesses at Microsoft's motives floated, including that they did it just to screw Apple. That makes little sense however. Despite what Apple loyalists tell themselves, today Apple is no threat to Microsoft nor is it likely to ever be one.

But factor in the port of XP to PowerPC and all of a sudden it stops looking like a weird whim and instead begins to look like a disturbing level of coherent strategy. With the release of the Media-enabled XBox2, Microsoft will own everything they need to dump Intel in favor of IBM.

At which point, IBM will own everything but PDAs and cell phones. But with all that other strength, plus their embedded experience and success, at that point thats a simple win. They are already half-way there with their embedded PPCs. And IBM certainly has the brain power to turn those into low-power PDA and cell phone chips.

And that would leave IBM and Microsoft holding all the cards in the consumer space. As the final, scariest thought. ask yourself this:

In a world of a single instruction set, the PPC instruction set, who needs a VM?

Posted at 04:50AM May 13, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[9]