A lot of people have been speculating lately that Microsoft may be eclipsed by Google. I'm sympathetic to that view, and I do think that Google poses a threat, but there's a dark horse in this race: Apple Computer Inc., which has quietly put together quite a run for itself.

I recently had occassion to purchase and configure a new Apple iBook, and I was impressed with everything about the experience. From the simple website, I was able to order a decent laptop with 1GB RAM for around $1,300 with shipping and everything. Much of the software I wanted pretty much came installed, and I was able to port Word documents, Quicken files and all my unix utilities and scripts without a single glitch.

More importantly, though, I started to really like the fit and finish of the OS. Dashboard is sweet, and the widgets are beautiful. Exposé is lovely and Spotlight is even better. The fonts render better. The icons look better, and there's an acknowledgement that computer users do a few key things with their machine that the OS should just know about. For instance: there's a single address book that's used by every email program, and it also syncs with your Palm.

So let's review the bidding. In the past few years, Apple has switched to an extremely stable, reliable unix core. It has created and dominated the market for personal media devices, and by extension, controls the de facto standard for the software that channels that media. Finally, it has announced a switch to the Intel processor, which opens its hardware to, at the very least, the well commoditized world of 3rd party Intel hardware, and potentially to the rock bottom world of OEM.

Steve Jobs would probably burn his company down before he'd let his artful Apple OS X run on a beige box with bolts sticking out of it, but the move to Intel could still create a seismic shift in the marketplace. Apple prices could conceivably come down, and Apple users can run crufty windows-only apps without too much emulation (or none at all, if there's a dual-boot capability.)

At the same time, Microsoft needs its users to adopt a whole new OS which is largely incompatible with existing flavors of Windows. In fact, it's conceivable that users will experience as much pain in migrating to Longhorn as they will in switching to a Mac. Add to this the fact that Media Center PC sales are way up, and you can make a compelling case that Microsoft can lose its grip -- especially in the Small/Medium Business and home markets.

But the measuring stick for any technology company right now is Google, and this is where I think the comparisons are most interesting. Google has always had a just-the-facts-ma'am interface style that emphasizes efficiency and does not shy away from geekiness. Apple is well known for its richly detailed look and feel, its gratuitous but pleasing animation (like Genie), and its friendly, approachable style.

The interesting thing here is that Apple is both the solution of choice for inexperienced computer users, AND a popular entry among the geek tastemaker set. For every gmail fanboy, I suspect that there are a lot of newbies who find its interace ugly and unapproacable, and a lot of techies who are put off by its barebones approach to layout and type styling.

Search is essentially a backend technology. A lot of retrospective fuss has been made over Google's search UI, thinking that it reflects some sort of minimalist aesthetic, but I think this is another example of the common Valley mistake of ascribing intention to something that's successful. Truth is, Google's success is really driven off of a technology that most of its users never see: its AdWords stuff, which is a fairly prosaic web workflow application that has flourished because of a novel business idea and the network effect.

Of course, it's easy to take pot shots at Google, and I should say that Google has built some amazingly valuable tech in some complex areas like redundancy, search, and mass storage. But I see Google as an empowering technology that will ultimately be utilized by a more consumer friendly front end. The ironic thing is that Google and the legion of related web-based apps are precisely paving the way for Apple's success. As users move more of their experience online, the become less tied to their local apps and the OS that runs them.

It's interesting to compare the corporate personality of Apple versus that of Google. Google is practically an open source environment, where project teams have little structure, and even less top-down guidance. Apple -- even more than Microsoft -- is dictated by the creative vision of one person. I'm convinced that a really good UI is a point-of-view, and that large unstructured teams are not capable of making good UI. By good UI, I mean something more than "efficient" or even "usable".

Of course, this is my bias, because Laszlo is a lot more like Apple than it is like Google. We're in to rich experiences and we think that a highly polished front end is valuable and hard to create. I guess we can watch the market to see if we're right about this. I expect to see Apple continue to increase its market share against Microsoft, and maybe even become a key player in Web 2.0.