Apple's Switch campaign to woo Windows users to its own operating system OS X has been running in high gear lately. Apple also recently issued a major "dot-level" upgrade to OS X called Jaguar, in what some industry followers consider to be a catch-up move to many of the features found in Windows XP.

My colleague David Coursey and I are working with Jaguar as a part of our ongoing investigations into its merits, deficiencies, and chances of winning over those who, by fiat or preference, are Windows devotees.

If you ask me, OS X could stand a better chance of challenging Windows on the desktop than Linux does, or ever did.

Although Apple's Switch campaign seems targeted mostly at consumers, I'm particularly interested in OS X's chances of penetrating the business world for uses that extend beyond the graphics and publishing intensive applications that most businesses use Macs for today.

OS X has several noteworthy business features, including: a Unix foundation that's perceived (perhaps mistakenly) by many to be more secure than Windows; support for PPTP-based VPNs; and a discovery technology called Rendezvous that makes child's play out of connecting to network-based resources (storage, printers, databases, etc.) including those bound to Windows systems.

Business software vendors are already coming out in support of Jaguar too. This week, Sybase announced the availability of an edition of Adaptive Server Enterprise that not only runs on OS X, but also supports the Rendezvous technology. Apple may not have yet cranked up the heat on businesses, but the underpinnings for such an offensive certainly seem to be falling into place.

But it's not features like these that make OS X a worthy Windows challenger. These and other business features, of which Linux bears many, are simply the cost of admittance to the game. To get businesses to convert, Apple will have to go farther.

Topping the list is the availability of Mac OS X-based systems from PC vendors other than Apple. Yes, for the second time in Apple's history, it has a real chance to do what it probably should have done when the Macintosh first came out: license the operating system. David Coursey has already posited that Apple will make an Intel-based version of Mac OS X available to its customers, but predicts that, like with today's OS X-based systems which are based on the PowerPC processor, Intel processor -based systems will only be available from Apple.

Porting Mac OS X to the Intel architecture isn't such a big deal. In fact, a lot of the work has already been done. Most of OS X is based on an open-source version of BSD Unix called Darwin, which is already available for the x86 architecture. In fact, you can download it from Apple's site. But, what you won't get with Darwin for x86 is the OS X graphical user interface and many of Apple's APIs, applications, and utilities that Apple has layered on top of Darwin. If the first half of Coursey's prediction is right, then the porting work on that is well underway. In fact, rumors are circulating about this Apple porting project, supposedly code-named Marklar. According to an Apple spokesperson, "we have no plans to move to Intel; but, as you know, we do not get into making forward-looking statements.". But if the second half of Coursey's prediction is right (and I'm afraid it is), then Apple would be making a big mistake.

Most IT managers might have taken the Macintosh route years ago, if it weren't for the price. Apple was the leader in usability. But, compared to an IBM-compatible color PC, a color Macintosh was prohibitively expensive then and remains more expensive today. That premium is apparently worth it to a select few. But stunning industrial designs (the iBook I'm testing routinely turns heads) and a few other bells and whistles won't be enough for most businesses

To eliminate that premium, and to turn the heads of business users, Apple must take advantage of the commoditizing effects of Intel's hardware and Microsoft's software. With PC vendors competing largely on price, the results have been dramatically lower prices for Intel-based desktop and notebook computers.

Comparing Latitude vs. iBook
As a reality check, I used Dell's site to price a configuration of a Dell Latitude notebook, the most popular of Dell's notebooks with business users. To the extent I could, I set it up with the same configuration as the $1,799 base configuration of Apple's 14.1-inch TFT display, 30GB hard drive, 256MB SDRAM-based iBook. To the cost of the iBook, I added the $319 for a copy of Microsoft's Office for OS X (the lowest price I could find on www.shopper.com) and $249 to extend the iBook's warranty to the same three years that the Dell is warranteed. With most other things being equal and for $100 less with Dell, I could get a 15-inch display versus the iBook's 14.1 inch display and a 1.6Ghz Mobile Pentium 4 (versus the iBook's 600mhz PowerPC).

My comparison is certainly no different from the sort of research that a business might undertake if prompted to consider OS X-based systems. The premium is not very compelling if you're a business watching its bottom line. This is why Apple needs system vendors competing against each other for sales of Mac OS X-based systems as they do for sales of Windows-based systems.

Based on my experience with OS X so far, Apple needs to do at least two other things if they want the idea of switching to be taken seriously.

First, with so many business e-mail users using Microsoft's Exchange server, Apple should figure out a way to seamlessly bridge Microsoft's proprietary e-mail and calendaring protocol (MAPI) to OS X's built-in Spam-killing mail client and recently introduced calendaring software (iCal).

Apple also needs to address another serious pain point for switchers. Proving that all GUIs are not created alike, the OS X user interface is significantly different from any version of Windows. Those of us accustomed to working with Windows' keyboard short cuts (for example, ALT-TAB to flip between tasks) and right-clicking mouse desperately need an interactive guide that explains how, under OS X, to convert those Windows habits to the Mac style. Such guides--and even the ability to change the default behavior to be more like what we're used to--were very helpful users who switched from WordPerfect to Word, or from Lotus 1-2-3 to Quattro Pro.

Another good example of this pain point is how, by default, the delete key on a Windows system deletes the character after the cursor. In OS X, the delete key's default behavior behaves like Windows' backspace key, deleting the character before the cursor. Holding the FN (function) key down while pressing Apple's delete key results in the same behavior as the delete key on Windows systems. How useful would it be to pop-up a Windows keyboard on the screen that, after pressing the Windows keys that I'm accustomed to pressing to get something done, showed me the OS X equivalent.

What else should Apple do to woo Windows users? I'll continue to report on my findings as I learn my way around OS X and attempt to integrate it into my work day, perhaps replacing Windows. Based on what I've seen so far, I wouldn't recommend this path to Windows-dependent businesses. At least not yet.

What do you think? What would it take for OS-X to have a chance on your desk? Does OS-X have a better chance of success than Linux? Or is Linux still #2 on the list? Does anything ever have a chance of challenge Windows' desktop dominance? Let me know. TalkBack to me below or write to me at david.berlind@cnet.com.