Last Thursday Apple announced, Leopard will not be released on time, during this spring, but about 4-6 months later – in October. This message made a huge storm on Apple related blogs and websites, also shares of Apple dropped by 2,5% during several hours.
But, Apple announced the reason for being late with Mac OS X Leopard – iPhone is the priority. Apple is known to be really focused on products, which are the most important for the future of the company.
My biggest worry is about Human Resources available to Apple. When Apple has to shift developers from group to group, which results in delays in the development effort – it means just one thing to me. Will be the company strong enough to react to the changes on the market?
When Apple needs to make a tough decision about stopping the development of the operating system, which was announced to the customers, it means – they employee low number of developers for the activities they plan to make. It had to be very tough for Apple to make the decision – the investors and the Apple community is not happy from the bad news – as missing Leopard can hurt the sales of the computers.
This was the most important message for me. We can have issues in the future, when we are in the pressure, that we will not be able to meet the requested deadlines as our development team are not staffed at the sufficient level.
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They didn’t stop development of the OS to work on the phone. They took the OS team that was working on the _desktop_ portion of the OS and put them on the OS portion of the phone. So the OS team was still working on the OS.
I think that Apple working on creating and proving the viability of the portability of the Darwin core is a strategic move to prove that they can react to changes in the market.
As it stands, most MS columnists are even saying that Tiger is still more advanced UI-wise than Vista. Apple’s got plenty of time to blow the doors off MS and raise the bar yet again. I’d rather have a rock-solid upgrade than a Vista-like lackluster or buggy upgrade.