A window of opportunity being closed?

Continuing on from my last post, as we all know, there's been a lot of talk about the new headless [i|e|x]Mac and to be honest, if the rumours are true and it's just a cheap Mac, I have to wonder who the market is.

After all, the specifications of such a machine preclude one activity with immediate effect: playing games.

Now, if this new Mac is some kind of home server appliance with a built-in PVR and all of the stuff you need to store all of your music, pictures and movies and serve them wirelessly, I'm up for it.

Better yet, if you can stick this under the television where it belongs, then Apple have got themselves a winning package.

One thing that makes me think this might be the case is the recent launch of TiVoToGo for PC only.

Now, given the high-profile gestures TiVo have made towards Apple with regards to Rendezvous wireless networking, one could be forgiven for thinking TiVo may well have done some back room deal to get TiVoToGo into the new Mac.

The point of all of this is that Apple can explore myriad options that are otherwise closed to Microsoft because they can't really do the hardware thang.

With the Xbox not withstanding, it's something that Microsoft will have to rely on their partners to do. In fact, the Xbox is a good example of the schism within Microsoft. Steve Balmer hated the idea and Bill Gates loved it.

The reason Steve Balmer hated it is because the Xbox wasn't ripe for Windows -- it just didn't have a place. Even more so now since the Xbox has gone all PowerPC on us and the up-coming Xbox is expected to ship with a couple of IBM G5's.

Now, unless Microsoft have abandoned development of both Windows Longhorn [read: Longyawn] and Windows XP to pool their army-like ranks of programmers to re-write Windows to work on the PowerPC architecture .. I think you know where I'm going, here.

So for Microsoft, you have a situation where you identify a new market, you know that you have to squeeze Windows in there somewhere, you also don't fully know where this nascent market is going because it's all still very fluid. Plus, it's a strategy you have to share with your partners and hope that they're going to go with the figures you're flashing under their collective noses, hoping that they will commit production time to make something to fit the trend.

Meanwhile, in comes Apple who have a knack for spotting trends, have the wherewithal and the resources to act quickly enough to get a foot in the door and do it cheap enough that if it doesn't work out .. so what?!

The more I think about it, the more I see emerging markets in consumer electronics being Apple's renaissance period...