There's been articles about this, Vista eating at Apple marketshare, go google.
Actually, the only statistical data suggests that Apple sales aren't increasing as quickly as Vista sales (no real surprise there, since there's nothing new for Apple to sell). It's also based on one month of data. Windows Vista market share, starting from zero, is taking market share from
everyone, because they're all slices of the same pie.
The fact that is that people are pointing fingers at Vista being incredibly late, but these people also forget that it took Apple a long time to get OS10 out the door.
Yes, but OS X was not delivered as a public announcement with massive developer ramp-up and release announcements. They worked on it until it was ready for the public beta stage, in 2000. It was released in 2001.
Vista on the other hand was announced, given flowcharts and business projections and release date announcements as early as 2001. It's been available to developers since 2002, along with pie-in-the-sky promises about worthwhile new features, almost none of which were delivered. Microsoft strung people along by making announcements based on ideas, not based on achievements. It didn't ship to consumers until 2007. Of course, if they hadn't announced features, people would have jumped ship because of low momentum and increasing delays. What they did was a calculated business move, but a massive industry backfire. Apple's delay announcement is a pretty typical delay announcement, with only rabid bloggers and forum whiners really upset. Developers and industry professionals haven't cried out in rage, and they won't.
If you're going to do something completely in public, you run the risk of being laughed at for your collossal failures. If you keep things hidden, you run the risk of not enticing enough people and losing some potential customers. But you can't base your "fairness in mockery" standards on hindsight. OS X was widely anticipated, but never given a shipping announcement. There was nothing to mock, because no indications had been made.
If people starting knocking other companies, and contrasting Apple, then you'd better make sure that Apple haven't done the same...
Every company has delayed projects and screwed up development. There's no such thing as someone free from hypocrisy. The entire industry has made Microsoft's massive failure a running joke because of the scale of it. When you get right down to it, everyone has screwed up. If you require a spotless record to make fun of someone, then everyone should be silent.
Both projects shared similar problems: both projects were late for various reasons, both involved rewrites etc.
One project had private, internal setbacks; the other project made public promises and failed to deliver, month after month and feature after feature in an almost unprecedented volume. They're not really similar at all, except in the way that all delays are similar.
Vista was a major re-write. OSX10.1, OSX10...5 were based upon 10.0 and so didn't involve such major development - more incremental development.
It was not. The underlying rewrite of the desktop framework was no more extensive or ambitious than Core Image and Quartz Extreme, and all those other features you rattled off are just new versions of software. Case in point: XP drivers do still work with Vista, they're just generally disallowed because they've tried to clean up the standards. It is absolutely nothing like the 98->XP transition or the OS9-OSX transition.
Vista
is a major rewrite. Not a total rewrite, but then again it didn't need to be like OS X did.
Think about it... total replacement/update of the following:
Printing subsystem (10.2), display subsystem (DWM) (10.4),
graphics subsystem (10.4), Media subsystem (10.3), Audio (10.4), Media Center (10.4/10.5), Networking (10.3), new search system (10.4)
There, updated for you with the "minor" updates of OS X that provided these "major" updates in Windows. I stopped early because I got bored.
Nothing like being a troll...
To be fair, he's right. Apple has about 1/10th the staff of even HP, which doesn't develop its own OS (but does quite a bit Apple doesn't). I think even Gateway has more permanent employees than Apple, and they barely even design their own computers.
There's only so much you can do when you're relatively low-staffed, particularly when you need expert-level workers to support a new project (like software integration of the iPhone and AppleTV). You can't just hire new programmers and hit the ground running. They would have had to expand their staff well over a year ago to have any measurable effect on current projects, and they may not have terribly large long-term need for the added staff. Once things settle down, they might be able to maintain all these projects on their own, and so the hiring would have been wasteful.
I highly doubt it will but it seems that the more diversified a company gets, the more it forgets about the little things.
It better be damn good.
