Personal Bytes

Windows Vista and Leopard delay

Some pundits, usually from the Windows arena, are criticizing Leopard’s delay to the same extent that people criticized Windows Vista delay. Leopard will suffer a delay of approximately 3 months while Vista was delayed 5 years. That’s 20 times more.

Besides the time frame, what’s the difference? Well, there are a couple of differences. I believe both Mac OS X Tiger and Windows XP are stable enough such that an absence of an update in the following months wouldn’t be a show-stopper to users. Vista launch comes to prove this. There is nothing in this new operating system that users might be dying for. DirectX 10 might be useful for gamers but the majority of the games are still using DirectX 9. Apart from that, Vista does not introduce any feature that could urge Joe user to update. Except for the eye candy. But those upgrading only due to the eye candy are Joe Dumb users. Anyway, I digress.

Mac OS X Tiger is the same. It’s really stable and has already a huge set of features that please any kind of user. The features being introduced by Leopard will definitely be very interesting but they are not that crucial to Apple’s success. Yes, ZFS is cool and so is Time Machine. But there are thousands of backup solutions right now so this will only leverage the efforts required to backup. Spaces is also cool but, again, there are applications like VirtueDesktops that provide similar kind of functionality.

Leopard and other possible innovations on the Apple arena

That being said, I don’t believe Leopard delay is a bad thing. A bad thing would be iPhone’s delay since it has been sharing a huge momentum and smartphone sales have already decreased in expectancy of iPhone’s arrival. Losing this momentum wouldn’t be a wise choice.

So, more than Leopard, I am looking forward to iWork 07 having better Word functionality and a Spreadsheet application. Truly revolutionary would be having an office suite that worked seamlessly with a web office suite. For instance, whatever changes you do would be immediately reflected online. A kind of a bridge between iWork and Google Docs & Spreadsheets. You could always chose to edit offline with your iWork Word/Spreadsheet editor or you could just go to your web browser and use the equivalent office suite.

Apple and Google partnership

Such a thing would be striking to Microsoft. Apple doesn’t have the resources to do it by itself but along with Google they could play as big contenders to displace Microsoft’s Office suite. Apple doing the desktop side and Google doing the web side. Some weirdo smart client encryption mechanism could be used to avoid storing plain text on the web server. Nevertheless, there’s a huge market share of people not worried about confidentially issues. There would be a market for it.

I envision only good things out of Apple and Google partnership. I just hope they just happen for the sake of market’s balance.

Anyway, Leopard delay is not a bad thing.