Even if you've never actually used the Mac OS X public beta yourself, if you're at all interested in the future of the Mac platform, you've surely read a fair bit about Apple's new operating system direction. That means, one way or another, you're aware that Mac OS X is a pretty drastic departure from the way Mac people have done things for sixteen years straight. Some of those changes are well-reasoned and welcome, while others seem entirely arbitrary and threaten to alienate users who want to do things "the Mac way." So why, pray tell, would Apple risk its one irreplaceable asset-- the loyalty of its customer base-- with such a seemingly unnecessary gamble?

Some people think it's just a Steve Jobs ego trip. After all, when you get right down to it, Steve's not exactly a Mac person-- he's a NeXT person. And since he's been in charge, the Mac is becoming more and more like the NeXT. (We should have seen it coming as soon as he got rid of the floppy drive.) But as faithful viewer Jean Willi points out, over at ZDNet, David Coursey has another take on the situation; he thinks that Mac OS X may simply be "an OS for Larry." Ellison, that is. Swimmin' pools... Movie stars.

Coursey goes on to list lots of intriguing facts which may help explain why Apple's betting it all on what is still fundamentally an enterprise operating system. There's nothing there that most of us didn't already know-- yeah, Steve and Larry are bestest buddies; sure, Larry's Oracle products are happy in a UNIX-based environment; of course, Larry wants to be Bill Gates-- but when seeing all those tidbits collected in one handy list, we admit, it looks like Steve might be bending over backwards to provide Larry with an installed base of Oracle-friendly systems so Oracle can become the Microsoft of the Internet. .NET, .SHMET; Larry wants nothing more than to take Bill down.

Reasonable? Hardly. Fun to consider? Sure! But in our opinion, Coursey doesn't take the motive far enough. Okay, so Larry and Steve are friends; is that enough reason for Steve to risk Apple's entire future for the sake of Larry's ambitions of world domination? Is there really a chance that a formal Apple-Oracle alliance could leverage the influence of the Internet to unseat the Microsoft-Intel hegemony? We just don't think Steve's quite that pie-in-the-sky about things anymore... he seems too realistic to go charging at windmills. Look at 1997's "truce" with Microsoft, for example.

Nope, there's only one reasonable explanation for Steve's complicity in Larry's takeover plans-- Larry's clearly got some dirt on Steve. Something terrible must have happened at one of Larry's wild CEO parties, something that even Alan Deutschman never uncovered when researching The Second Coming of Steve Jobs. Something involving, perhaps, an underage model, half a kilo of heroin, and concrete shoes for a city councillor who opposed the construction of Steve's helipad-- and Larry's got it all on tape. Hey, blackmail really does make the world go 'round!