Originally posted by mcsjgs
I hate to bring up the evil empire, but MSFT does a lot of beta testing with just users, although you would not know it from some of the glitches in security. But it does pay off in the plug and play part of their OS.
Well, yes. But it depends on how you define "a lot". Is it based on marketshare? R&D budget? Number of other beta testers? Price per release*? (All of which Apple has much,
much less of than Microsoft does.)
Not to mention that Apple puts out major, feature-adding OS releases about five times more often than Microsoft. I believe Longhorn's beta testing program will be well over a year. Do you really think Apple could do the same thing with each 10.x release? Probably not.
What's more, considering the vastly fewer hardware configurations OS X has to deal with as compared to XPee, you could argue that Apple can justify even
fewer non-developer/-engineer beta testers than would be accounted for by the four factors listed above (budget, marketshare, other testers, price--which I suppose are all interrelated anyway).
I guess what it boils down to is this: I'm pretty happy with the way OS X's development is going. I don't think I could suffer through four or five years of the same basic OS release, and I'm very willing to pay for the privilege of major annual releases--both financially and in terms of the bugs I'll have to put up with until 10.x.x fixes them. (And I'm experiencing very, very few of them in Panther; printing in Times seems pretty weird, but hopefully 10.3.2 will fix that
).
BTW, thanks for the corrected ADC bug reporting link.
WM
*What I mean here is, Microsoft charges like $200 for each major upgrade (e.g. XP Pro)--about 50% more than Apple does for an annual 10.x release. So there are more testing resources for each copy, and MS sells way more copies. This is probably a redundant point (not too different from R&D budget), but whatever.
Finally, I'm pretty sure Apple sold about a million copies of Jaguar, presumably most of them at about $129. (Actually, that could be an interesting question--how do they figure in the family packs [five licenses for $199] and the educational sales [$69 to individuals, and less to institutions; zero for Jaguar for Teachers participants]? Plus, considering that Amazon sells Panther for about $100, the wholesale cost must be way less. But I digress.) Now, AFAIK software has a very low marginal cost, so you're basically paying for R&D with your $129. Well, guess what? Apple's R&D budget was about $500 million last year, and about 25% of that was for OS development (IIRC--if you're less lazy than me you can check this out
). That works out to about $120-130 million in OS R&D!!! With somewhere around (perhaps) $100-130 million in revenue! This is not where their profits are coming from!!
And if they spent more money on beta testing (although AppleSeed-type programs probably don't cost
too much), they'd make even less, if anything.
