I’ve seen a few articles speculating on the “meaning” of Apple’s schedule slip for its next OS release. AppleInsider speculates that it’s due to “top secret features.” Apple’s official reason is that it needed to pull talent off of OS X to get the iPhone ready for shipping in June — which, to me, seems odd.
Isn’t that basically the same as Apple admitting they don’t have the ability to walk and chew gum support two complex products at the same time? It doesn’t seem like something Steve Jobs would admit to readily, and I really can’t imagine a competent PR person who gives a flying frog’s butt about the stock price clearing that statement. (Not that Jobs has to clear his statements with Apple PR, I’m sure, but I suspect there’s some coordination before major announcements.)
So, is OS X going to have some super-secret goodies, or did they really just need extra polish time? Maybe Jobs is waiting for the Free Software Foundation to finish the GPLv3 so that Apple can license everything under GPLv3. Hey — Sun has been talking about licensing Solaris under a GPL (not quite sure if it’s GPLv3 or GPLv2) and Apple is showing interest in ZFS and DTrace… so why not?
In all seriousness, though, I think this is another validation of the open source model. All the Apple fans are waiting for Apple to tie everything together and ship it as a coherent product. You can do that with something like Ubuntu, or other open source projects — or you can dig into the beta tree and start using software long before it’s officially blessed by the project or company behind it.
You can start using updated applications immediately, in most cases, without waiting for the entire OS to ship. For instance, KDE released two point releases (if memory serves correctly) during Kubuntu Edgy’s lifespan — which meant I was running the new KDE within a day or two of its upstream release without waiting for Kubuntu Feisty. I was using the new Amarok releases a day or so after they were finished. Wouldn’t it be nice if Apple users could start using the new, oh, Mail.app right away instead of waiting for it to ship later?
I won’t even go into Windows Vista, except to say that if Microsoft shipped in a similar fashion to open source projects, it might not be quite so embarrassing how lackluster Vista adoption has been so far — nor would customer expectation have been built up so much as Microsoft slipped deadline after deadline after deadline.
It’s also clear that ship dates are clearly an art rather than a science. If you’re going to promise feature A, B, and C on a specific date, you’d better almost have them in the can now, or be very, very lucky. I think GNOME and Ubuntu have it right — a ship date every six months, but with the idea that they’ll ship what’s ready when it’s ready, and if something doesn’t make the cut for the six month release, then it gets held back.
