Bob Bou is not one to make such a statement lightly, so there is surely something to this.
On the other hand--and please remember, I speak as an abused Mac lover; all Mac lovers have been abused by Apple--Apple has proven very fickle in this market. None of the company's leaders--and I have spoken with all of them over the years--really has a clue as to the potential of the engineering market, or its loyalty; or as to the popularity of the Mac among leading-edge Silicon Valley engineers of all stripes.
Even at the peak of Apple's flirt-ship with the engineering market--actually, just architecture--they were doubleminded about. They had two full-time architects as evangelists; bought expensive ads; held seminars--then behaved very impolitely toward developers who had committed to them.
But that was in the early '90's, and one might be justified in thinking that whatever went on then has no bearing on what might go on now.
Perhaps. But when I tried to interview someone at Apple about potential engineering applications of OS X, on the eve of the release of Jaguar, the first properly-working version of the os, I was received with incredible hostility. They did not even want to send me a copy of the operating system to review! I had to explain, justify, assure them I was generally favorable, and more--and even then I was regarded with open suspicion and condescension.
The company's representatives--and mind you, this is just a few months ago--explained that they no longer think about "vertical markets" such as engineering. That they encouraged all developers to work on the Mac, but had no particular goal of getting, say, CAD companies, or any other particular application area, onto the platform.
I felt as if I had wandered into a minefield that had not been laid out especially for me, but the explosions were very real, and so were the hints of body parts lying around on the ground.
And although I have been happily using OS X since then, and have favorably reviewed it, in fact, I never received another communication from Apple PR.
So if there is a change of heart at Apple regarding our market, it hasn't made itself evident in the company's PR or marketing realm yet.
But I hope it's true. As Anthony Frausto of Architosh noted, OS X is the world's most popular and most friendly flavor of UNIX. It is an industrial-strength OS in a relatively trouble-free package.
We'll see.
