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While the timing of Apple's BootCamp may have been a surprise, the fact that it did it at all should have been less of a shock.

We've known since Apple announced it would ship Macs with Intel processors that running Windows natively wouldn't present too many technical challenges, and the company itself said it would do nothing to prevent users from installing Windows on an Intel Mac. And it's not as if Apple hasn't done this sort of thing before. Back in the mid-1990s it shipped some of its Macs with what it called a 'DOS card' installed. This essentially allowed users to run DOS on their Mac without resorting to emulation software. It meant that you could then install Windows and run it natively. However, it was an expensive option and with the advent of better emulation software, it became less attractive and was eventually canned. Then of course, there was the dalliance with the Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP), which was supposed to enable computers to be manufactured using a common set of hardware components that would be platform agnostic and thus enable the machines to run Mac OS, Windows NT, and various flavours of Unix. That died too - the only Mac that was ever built using the CHRP design was by Motorola and it never made it out the door before Steve Jobs cancelled the licensing agreement allowing companies to make Mac clones. The machine did, however, win Motorola a specially commissioned black MacUser Award, in recognition of the great Mac that might have

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been.

So what's prompted this latest move? Well, Apple is smart enough to understand that once it moved to Intel, the genie was out of the bottle. If it didn't provide an easy way to allow us to run Windows, then someone else would - as has been shown by Parallels' recently announced virtualisation software, Workstation. By building the ability to boot into Windows within the OS, Apple presents itself as the good guy, the company with an operating system so good that it's happy for you to run Windows alongside it for those occasions when you just can't find a Mac application that does the job.

It's also smart enough to understand that with a brand now among the world's most recognisable, far more people are aware of its computers than ever before. This presents it with an oportunity to sell Macs to millions of people who might never even have known that Apple makes computers, let alone thought of buying a Mac. The biggest hurdle, of course, was the fact that Macs don't run the software they use on a day-to-day basis. Now they do. In theory, at least, that presents a fantastic opportunity for Apple to do things to its market share that the Board could previously only have dreamed about.

Analysts, of course, can't agree on whether the theory of increased market share will ever become a reality. For each one that writes a note to investors telling them how much 'upside' Boot Camp presents for Apple stock, there's another, more cautious soul, who adopts a wait-and-see approach. But when have analysts been noted for predicting something that's a bit tricky to analyse, as opposed to stating the bleeding obvious? There are enough PC manufacturers around who believe there is a pent up demand for PCs that look like Macs to have produced some pretty horrendous-looking Mac clones over the years. That market can now have the real thing. Too expensive? Not necessarily. Evesham Technology attracted a great deal of attention last year for its Mac mini lookalike and won lots of plaudits, despite the fact that it was significantly more expensive than the mini.