Opinion: R.I.P. MacOS X Server, we hardly knew ye

With the news today that Apple's MacOS X Server 1.0 has been released to manufacturing a scant five months late, it is with some amount of sadness that I must report that I will no longer be covering developments with this once-exciting OS. When Apple bought Steve Jobs--er, Next Computer--over two years ago, it promised to release Intel and PowerPC versions of its OpenStep operating system, which became known as Rhapsody. However, with the ascendancy of Steve Jobs within Apple, plans for an Intel version of Rhapsody, which became MacOS X Server 1.0, were first put on the back burner and then completed canned.

The enormity of this error cannot be understated. There is a huge market of Intel-compatible machines out there that simply dwarfs the installed base of PowerPC boxes by an order of magnitude. And there is also a huge demand for servers running BSD UNIX with a gorgeous user interface. MacOS X Server is all this and more, but now it comes with a price: You must by the decidedly non-standard and more expensive Apple G3 machines to get it. By pinning their hopes to the dwindling Mac/PowerPC market, Apple has effectively killed any hope that this operating system ever had. Of course, with the sudden rise in popularity of Linux as a server OS, perhaps its fate was already sealed.

We'll never know. And that's a shame.

--Pau