Ah, yes, the market. If Apple and Microsoft don't give you what you want, put a bounty on it and see if the Internet will provide. This is exactly what Colin NederKoorn has decided to do, and he's getting help. As of 10pm last night, people had pledged (and paid) almost $3,000 into a pot to be claimed by the first person to provide proof and repeatable, usable steps to dual-boot a new Intel Macintosh with XP and OS X.

The contest is reasonably well designed with rules that appear to provide for exactly what people have been trying to do for the last couple of weeks and a (now very) serious incentive to do it. ClueTrust dropped some coin in this AM and Delicious Monster has dropped in $1,000 - making it the largest contributor by far. Many of the folks have put in token amounts (note the 80.86 donated by Michael S and the number of people who donated $6.66) and there seems to be a lot of interest.

There's an expiration date of March 23,2006 after which time all of the money will go to an undetermined charity.

As for "why?" I think it's pretty simple. I want to see more people with Macintoshes. For home users, this means that the games are out, which is a big problem for families with children, until we see more Mac games. For business users, IT organizations often require certain operating systems be installed on the machines carried by their employees. If we have dual-boot, then that means some segment of the market that otherwise would have to buy a PC gets to buy a Macintosh and run whichever OS they find best... which one do you think that would be?