Last week, Robert Cringely posted an interesting story (one that I will emphasize right here and now is complete an utter speculation: nothing, I repeat, nothing you read here is grounded in fact, so don't go throwing yourself out a window or buying Adobe/Apple stock by the handfuls based on this...depending on how you feel about it...) suggesting Apple's near-future business strategy. With release of the Boot Camp Public Beta, you can now run Windows on an Intel-based Macintosh.

Cringely analyzes how this positions Apple to confront Microsoft in a much bigger way than it has in years. Mostly, he spends the article discussing how Apple can compete with MS Office (pointing out Apple's support of Open XML as a document standard as a savvy move in the right direction), but toward the bottom of the page, he also points out Apple's reliance on Adobe as a major developer of applications for their OS. To alleviate this dependence and ensure continued dominance (though I think I would question the dominance at this point in time myself) in the graphics market, Cringely suggests that Apple just buy Adobe!

I wonder why Cringely didn't make a little more out of Adobe's document business as a potential competitor for Office in and of itself. It seems like the whole Acrobat side of things might get Apple a fairly large step of the way toward competing with Microsoft.

Crazier things have happened (who would have thought 18 months ago that Adobe would now own Macromedia?!), I guess. For the conspiracy theorists out there, Rigel has just enough to get the saliva glands going (the entire Aperture team laid off?!), but I'm not going to hold my breath here...just keep my eyes open and always look over my shoulder...