Jobs was quoted last year at the Apple Expo Paris stating, “We are very careful about what features we add because we can’t take them away.”

If those words stand to be true, then with the release of Boot Camp, the PC industry that the world has come to accept will no longer stand true. It has changed for good, and depending on who you are, either for better or worse.

With the purchase of the latest Apple hardware, you can now have the tight knit hardware reliability of Apple engineering, the sleek eye-catching industrial design from Apple’s Jonathan Ive, the ability to run your employer’s proprietary applications that was designed for your company’s Windows systems, and the fun that comes from being able to run the newest PC games. In other words, you really can have your cake (Apple?), and eat it too.

It truly was insensitive on Steve’s part to have done this so soon after the switch to Intel, as if the zealots were not upset enough about the switch.

What does all of this mean for the future of the personal computing industry? These are my predictions:

1) Lenovo is going to feel the negative effects of this transition in the next couple of years. It’s too bad, since they just picked up the notebook division from IBM. It was a good move on Lenovo’s part at the time, since IBM has a huge share of the corporate laptop market- a market that is incredibly hard to penetrate. With Lenovo dropping the IBM moniker from the ThinkPads, they are bound to lose the brand recognition that comes with those three uppercase letters. As companies shop around for their next slew of laptop purchases, they’re bound to run into the versatility and dependability of the new MacBooks.

2) Apple is adding to the ‘everyone has Windows’ mantra. Now it’s ‘everyone has it, even Apple is forced to run Windows’. I remember my first couple of weeks with OS X. If I could have ran Windows on my PowerBook, I would have, and would never have booted up OS X again. But since I was forced to run OS X, after the initial learning curve, I grew to love it and find myself more productive than ever in OS X. The fact that I don’t have to worry about malware and trojans isn’t bad either. However, most people are not willing to suffer the initial learning curve and will be booting XP before their next iTunes purchase. Until Apple releases a supported way of running Windows applications within the OS X environment (one step further than Parallels current solution), they’re going to see the OS X market share shrink. But Microsoft will see an increase in retail Windows XP sales.

3) Why wait months for Universal applications when you can boot Windows on your new Mac, and experience the raw speed of leading edge Apple hardware running your professional apps. Apple is going to lose a few professional customers (at least the ones who need to buy new hardware urgently) to the Windows platform. If the customer has already invested in Windows based professional applications, when the Universal version comes out for OS X, are they willing to reinvest their money into the exact same software just to get back to OS X?

These are just some of the problems (or benefits) of this rapid change in direction from Apple. Depending on what perspective you view this change– Apple has either turned its back on the professionals who stayed true to the Apple brand and the MacOS during its downfall in the mainstream consumer market or Apple has finally understood that most of its customers are forced to use Windows and need the ability to run both operating environments. All in all, it is definitely a great push for Apple hardware, but the Apple software side of things might just slip.

Meh, who knows. I don’t. Tell me what you think.