Robert X Cringely knows industry people, and he has a good grasp of tech vocabulary, but he just doesn't get the full picture of how things really work, or what is involved in engineering complex solutions. Unlike F.U.Dvorak or the great mind behind the Windows SuperSite, Cringely at least comes across as a nice guy. Regardless, leaping to grand and fantastical conclusions isn't the same as speculation based on facts.

In particular, Cringely's Red Box punditry involves some extremely problematic leaps of logic:

• First, that development of a "Red Box" is either already complete or can be whisked together without much effort, since Apple already has some exposure to Microsoft technologies from existing intellectual property sharing agreements;
  
  
• Second, that Apple would have the interest, desire, and profit motive to sideline its existing business, and developments already in progress, to devote a massive investment in maintaining a secondary version of the Windows platform, entirely dependent on the whim of Microsoft;
  
  
• Third, that Apple, by allowing Intel based Macs to boot Windows using the BootCamp tools, has signaled interest in a far flung campaign to out-Microsoft Microsoft at being Microsoft, which includes finding ways to add Windows to Mac OS X (and perhaps eventually replacing Mac OS X with Windows) in a bizarre and surreal effort to beat Microsoft at its own game.

The first painfully destructive fact is that developing a Red Box would be a monumentally massive undertaking and a huge investment of time and money. Even if Apple had some insider rights to the "Windows API," they simply could not deliver a functional compatibility environment for Windows applications anytime before 2011, at which time it would be wholly obsolete. Why?

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