Run Mac OS X on your PC: Cherry OS is released, gets slashdotted, and site goes off-line

A small company company called Cherry OS is in the midst of it’s Warholian 15 minutes of fame. It has released an emulator that lets people run Mac OS 10.3 on their PCs. It was apparently slashdotted and now their website is overloaded. Good for them.

I’m thinking that this means that if people could buy and run Mac OS X on their wicked-fast PC Hardware, that they would do it in a second. Brilliant. Apple should buy them (like Microsoft bought Connectix) and make sure that it’s rock-solid and beautiful. Why? They get OS License revenue for each and every one of those copies that could possibly be sold to those PC users who will not likely EVER buy Apple hardware but who may quite happily pay Apple $250.

Apple, are you listening? Here will be Steve Job’s reply: “It’s not elegant, it’s all kludged together, you know we can run OS X on Pentiums but we choose not to, because, by controlling the hardware and the software, we can do really great things.”

Guess what? With this layer of abstraction in place, you can continue to do great things, AND sell more software to the iPod-wearing PC users. Pretty soon, they’ll be so used to running OS X that they’ll say, “Hey maybe I should buy a MAC and run Virtual PC on it instead?”