Well. This is why I don’t make my living as a fortune teller.

Yesterday, Steve Jobs shocked me and 15,000,000 of my closest friends by announcing that sometime in the next two years our shiny new Macs will be running on the brains of the enemy. Well, not enemy per se. But at least the Vichy CPU. It’s a bit hard to reconcile the anomie that on the one hand, Intel chips are wonderful for us starting in a year or two, but right now they still suck.

Naturally, this has caused the largest outbreak of heated debate on the Internet since the release of Hamsterdance. The net impact this should have on most users is zero; the CPU is safely protected beneath about a dozen layers of abstraction and unless you’re writing software, for most purposes you shouldn’t need to care about this one way or the other. When you board an airplane, do you ask yourself whether the engines are made by Pratt & Whitney? Or is your sole concern that you don’t take a sudden unscheduled stop in Kansas?

But that’s just a rational perspective, which doesn’t ensure that it’s going to be a part of the news discussion. The first AP article on the story—and unfortunately I have to paraphrase here as they’ve rewritten the text—opened with, “taking a risk that could threaten to reduce its already miniscule market share….” The current story leads, “After touting its Macintosh computers as superior alternatives for more than 20 years….”

Well, yes. And we still think the computers are superior, thank you very much. Show me a Wall Street analyst who has had to spend as much time troubleshooting one Windows server as it takes on a dozen Macs, and I’ll be glad to listen to him.

That’s the bottom line. Macs are Macs because of the OS. But perception is reality, and a bloviating pundit on CNBC who thinks he knows Macs because he used one in the Wharton undergraduate labs will get a larger audience than I do.

Still, there are some end-user issues here, no question about it. I know diddly about Intel servers (today), but I’m hearing that they run a lot hotter than PowerPC equivalents, and that’s a problem when you’re building a server closet. The Altivec in the G4 and the G5 can do some really stunning work without hitting the main CPU, and that’s one of the upcoming performance issues.

On the other hand, anyone who can write an emulator that can run the PowerPC version of Office and Photoshop—creme de la creme CPU hogs— on an Intel chip at decent speeds is practicing a form of black magic. That was demoed yesterday. Apple has another year to practice more necromancy, and I’m sure the result will be summarized: “Yeah, we’d like the emulation to be faster, but this is good enough.”

So what does this mean for Mac users? And for people not (yet) using Macs? I’ve spent the last 12 years working with around a hundred Mac-using offices, and I talk to folks in the other camp, and let me tell you—I think I live on a different planet from most Wall Street analysts on a normal day.

First, when the entire personal computing world is running Intel and Intel-compatible chips, the first thought is whether you’ll be able to buy a Mac and install Windows on it as well. Initial reports are that Apple won’t support you if you do, but they won’t try to stop you. So now you can buy that sexy Mac laptop (and here’s where we’ll find out if PowerBooks maintain their eye-catching qualities separate from the OS; my guess is “yes”), boot into Windows at work, and boot into Mac at home. Given the very large number of people I know who are currently dual-OS users on separate hardware, I think this will be a rather common occurence.

Which raises another interesting question. The Mac camp has believed for years that it didn’t matter how much better our OS was, or how much money was burned on protecting against Windows virus attacks; since the only glide path to adopting Mac OS was to switch hardware entirely, few companies were willing to take that level of risk. With Intel Macs, you might see a test group buying Mac hardware and dual-booting; if the Mac OS experiment fails, they simply leave those machines on Windows. If it succeeds, then watch that hardware spread further into the company as hardware is upgraded.

What happens if Mac OS is seen as better? Turns out, for 90% of business functions (which means, let’s face it, Microsoft Office and Outlook), there’s Mac software that does the same job or better. What forces many people to stick to Windows OS is that single application that doesn’t exist on Mac; granted, there are 100,000 such applications, but there are maybe a dozen prime suspects, and it’s very rare for a single user to run more than one or two.

Now let’s consider WINE, which allows Linux users running on Intel chips to launch Windows applications within a Linux environment. Tack something similar into the new Mac OS, and suddenly you don’t have to leave the Mac environment to pop into Act! or your CAD software.

I’ve read one analysis that predicts that this will lead to the death of the Mac. But this could work the other way: perhaps a side-by-side comparison of Mac versus Windows will lead people to stick with the Mac overall environment, and they’ll launch those remaining apps only with great reluctance. Which is much the experience of Mac users today running Virtual PC or a separate Windows PC.

At the risk of condescending to my Windows-using friends, most Mac users believe that Windows users put up with their software because they don’t know any better. During a recent side-by-side web development session, it made my eyes hurt to see how my website is rendered with Windows. If we’ve been right all along, then more people are going to see how the other half (alright, 16 percent) lives.

So far, though, I’ve still just been dealing with Macintosh hardware. The big wildcard is Mac OS on existing Windows hardware. Apple’s official line as of yesterday is, “no, you can’t do that.” Talk about waving a red flag in front of the world’s hacker community, which loves doing what they can’t do. Apple also said, “you can’t install Linux on an iPod,” and look what happened.

Well, actually, Apple never said that, because they probably never thought that anyone would be crazy enough to try. OS X on Windows hardware, heck, that’s a no-brainer.

So given my previous history of thinking that what happened yesterday would never happen, I’ll try to redeem myself with this one: Mac OS X will be running on Windows hardware within weeks of its release. The only question is whether it will require major geek skills to get it running (cf. WINE under Linux), or whether it’s point-and-click (cf. X11 on Mac OS X).

Let’s move ahead a few months. Windows users are clamoring to buy OS X for their hardware. Apple has already started to see if the dual-boot scenario I posited above lets them sell hardware to previously-closed enterprises—and hence allows them to take a smaller hit on hardware sales by not forcing people to buy Mac hardware to run Mac OS. Anyone who wants to can do this anyway if they’re willing to jump through a few hoops (or, ahem, hire a consultant to do it for them). What it takes is for Apple to believe that their hardware can sell itself on its own merits.

What do you suppose Apple’s response will be? Well, you used to need a Mac to buy an iPod.

Then you finally have the true deathmatch—Mac OS on Windows machines, Windows running native on Macintoshes. Microsoft releases Longhorn, Apple releases Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5), and you can try them both out. But most of the world is still running Windows. What does Apple do then?

Tiger will then be the old OS. It will run on Intel machines. So Apple runs the Switcher campaign of all time and you’ll be able to buy it at any Apple retailer for $19.95. Which means that you’ll have to walk into an Apple Store and take the initial sip of the Kool-Aid: look over the new Apple hardware that blows away the features of your current hardware, talk to a few Apple Geniuses, and pick up the materials from what is indisputably one of the best marketing machines on the planet.

Yes, even I think this all sounds crazy. But after yesterday, it’s the path of least resistance.

Coming next: what current Mac owners should do, what prospective Mac owners need to know, and what this means for any professional working on the Mac platform.

[This essay is part of The Red and the Blue discussion: Apple Switches to Intel.]