Apple’s Snow Leopard operating system update to Mac OS X is perhaps only two months away and already it is causing a stir. On one front the Khronos Group and its supporters of OpenCL (a parallel computing technology to be at the heart of Snow Leopard) have announced that OpenCL spec is finished and ready for prime-time adoption.
Why the fast push in record time? One Intel employee involved said it was to get it into Apple’s Snow Leopard — of which he sounded pretty excited about.
Endangering Vista
But Snow Leopard is causing a stir for other reasons as well. For one, Apple’s pace of improvement to OS X is nothing but mind-blowing compared to Microsoft’s snail pace development to its Windows OS and its now beleaguered Vista. Forbes has a interesting article online that is more valuable for its reader’s feedback — perhaps — than for the actual article.
The Forbes piece notes that Apple is expected to ship as many as 2.7 million Macs this holiday quarter during a global economic crisis. That’s a 13% year-over-year improvement. Expect the rest of the PC industry to be (YoY) flat or even worse.
A reader commented that he manages over 700 PCs in an architectural and engineering firm and sees no reason to upgrade to Vista. “64bit XP does everything we need.” However, this same reader makes very blind accusations about Apple’s Mac tech support costs so we can perhaps judge him as “extreme” in his views.
Ignore Vista and Wait for Windows 7
Another reader says that “if you are a CIO or IT professional, you should seriously be looking for alternatives. Stop doing business as usual, think about what your company or client really needs, stop paying the MS tax for bloated software (Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Visio, etc.) and gain a competitive advantage in your markets.”
Perhaps this is what may happen for many…once Snow Leopard comes out ahead of Windows 7 — which honestly, given an aggressive schedule with Snow Leopard, may just be rushed like Vista was! That will only make matters worse for Microsoft.