There is no large-scale quantitative market data available for publishing markets on an international scale, although it is quite clear that Apple is still by far the predominant player, despite some market erosion in the last year.

According to the research conducted by Pfeiffer Consulting (which is qualitative and not quantitative in nature) Apple holds anywhere between 65 and 85 percent of market share depending on market niche.

Predictions of Apple's demise in its core market have been around for as long as the two platforms have existed. Windows 95, then Windows 2000, followed by Windows XP—each were expected to wrench market dominance of publishing away from Apple. Nothing of the kind has happened so far, despite Microsoft's improvements on some key problem areas for Windows regarding font and color management issues.

Creative Suite 2 presents a challenge for Quark. Click here to read more.

The arrival of Tiger, and the unclear status of Longhorn delivery from Microsoft, however, make the question of the best operating systems for publishing relevant in a different way. So far, Apple's and Microsoft's offerings seem to be on something of a converging path: Apple increasingly offers support for standards prevalent on the Windows side of things, be it in terms of hardware, network support or data formats. Even in terms of user interface, Mac OS X seems to be perceived as less alien by Windows users than older versions.

This is changing, however. With the arrival of Tiger, something interesting is happening: We are witnessing the emergence of a different approach to user interfaces.

In Panther, the previous release of Mac OS X, Apple introduced the sidebar in file-navigation windows, as well as Exposé, which allows viewing all open documents in reduction. This feature is extremely popular with designers and graphic artists, since it makes it easy to switch rapidly between different documents. Tiger extends this approach: The search technology Spotlight effectively changes how one accesses and works with files since the precise location of the file is of less importance.

Spotlight is likely to be another big hit in the publishing world: In a deadline-driven industry such as design and publishing, anything that can speed up file access is essential. (Incidentally, Pfeiffer Consulting's research into creative markets shows that design and publishing users perceive these user interface refinements as very useful and tend to use them extensively to speed up their work.)

These features have more to do with the creative markets than one might think. When one digs a bit deeper into Spotlight, Apple's attention to trends in the creative markets becomes more apparent. For instance, Spotlight allows searching the EXIF metadata that is automatically generated by a large number of modern digital cameras. This means, for instance, that a user can find all pictures taken with a 35-mm lens, or shot using a 400 ISO camera setting.

By comparison, Microsoft's attention to creative professionals and publishers is relatively minimal—and it seems to be decreasing. It may come as a surprise that this year's WinHEC developer conference does not carry any sessions on color management. (Last year, several sessions outlined Microsoft's color-management architecture for Longhorn.)

Click here to read Mac industry reactions to Apple's new Tiger OS.

It is true that Microsoft has a strong ally in the form of Adobe's Creative Suite. One of the key developments behind all of the company's creative applications is the Adobe Graphics Manager, which effectively shields the design and publishing environment from the shortcomings of Windows.

Take typography, for instance: The standard Windows character set does not support ligatures (specially designed glyphs which replace the letters "fi" and "fl" in many fonts). Ligatures are barely known to casual users, but they are a big deal for type-conscious design professionals.

The Macintosh has always supported basic ligatures. As a result, QuarkXPress supports these glyphs on the Macintosh, but not on Windows, since the program relies heavily on the operating system for graphics services. The Adobe Graphics Manager, on the other hand, has its own type-rendering engine and glyph set, and is not affected by the limitations of Windows. (This also applies to color management, which is much more smoothly handled in Adobe's Creative Suite than in plain vanilla Windows.)

Likewise, Adobe Bridge, the program which works as a file-browsing and management utility shared by all applications in Creative Suite 2, is likely to be a bigger success on Windows than on the Mac, since it brings some file-management features that don't exist on Windows, such as a sidebar to the main browser Window that can display user-defined favorite folder locations to speed up file access.

Quite clearly, Adobe is bringing a lot of credibility to Windows as a publishing and design platform: In our (Pfeiffer Consulting's) research projects in professional publishing, we saw a number of companies tempted by a move to Windows—and in each case this was linked to Adobe InDesign and the Creative Suite.

It could well be that Adobe's software suite will increasingly become the lingua franca of professional design and publishing. And this might spell trouble for Apple if the company does not keep innovating. Today, however, the problem is not yet acute: Apple's Tiger release is probably one of the most desirable versions of Mac OS yet, both for consumers and professional users, and Apple's bold claims of the "most advanced operating system" sound less and less boisterous.

Andreas Pfeiffer is founder of The Pfeiffer Report on Emerging Trends and Technologies.