Slashdot Mirror
Apple Offers Solution to IT Roadmap Complaints
daria42 writes "Apple has admitted that enterprise IT users complain a lot about not being able to find out what its product roadmap is ahead of time. The Apple answer to this problem? Sign a non-disclosure agreement and go to Apple's annual worldwide developer conference, to be held in August this year in San Francisco. IT users can apparently get plans of Apple's roadmap up to 18 months ahead."
(everything except size and shape).
And Price.
You can bet there will be no juicy information such as "We plan to have a expandible minitower on the market for $800 in 2007. So don't buy a PowerMac unless you *really* need it!!". Instead you'll get the standard Intel roadmap which anyone can read on the Inqurier.
I think this is really to molify institutional concerns about the Intel switchover -- It happened so fast, I imagine that quite a few shops that couldn't manage budgets/planning quickly enough. One day they were selling iMac G5s and the next day they weren't, and too bad if you were using Photoshop or something.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Obviously, with as many rabid fans as Apple has, releasing a roadmap without an NDA would most certainly not work.
And yet, even with the NDA, like the only other post so far said, it will get leaked.
Apple just can't win here.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Apple always keeps its products uber-secret no matter what, Palm likes to do similar things. Gotta love this fruit company :P
Things DO leak, but when they leak it's generally two weeks before the thing is released.. And usually you can't even tell what it is, like this "Ultra-Portable" device Apple allegedly wants to make. It could be a new iPod, or it could be a new MacBook [Pro].
So unless you signed an agreement with them, chances are you won't exactly know what Apple is trying to do. And when you do know, you're gonna have to keep it secret or else the Apple Police will follow you home and kill your dog.
o hai
FTFA, Its software roadmap they are primarily talking about. "Those attending the conference get a clear roadmap of Apple's software development plans up to 18 months ahead"
I imagine that most IT guys aren't interested in hardware speed. They're more interested in software and interoperability. You don't want to roll out software and training programs to find out they've been dropped/updated/replaced. You don't want to buy hardware or software add ons for Apples if Apple is going to make them obsolete.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Apple are deliberately quiet about future products both from a marketing perspective and because it makes them a leaner, more responsive company. They can suddenly release software like Aperture and Bootcamp out of the blue when its ready and the time is right for them.
the more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the pipe
Apple's own MacOS X Product Manager has pointed out that they've only not released the Intel xnu code yet.
This follows Apple's pattern of getting the code working, then packaging it up when they get a chance.
There has been no official closing of anything, just one overheated journalist's rumor-mongering.
For a great rebuttel to Yager's blathering I recommend reading The 'Mac OS X Closed by Pirates' Myth.
In the meantime don't repeat rumor and assumption as fact.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Having used Apple's enterprise hardware and software (OS X Server and XServe) for three years, I can tell you that Apple just doesn't get the enterprise. They are either unwilling or unable to treat enterprise customers any differently than their average consumer customer. Only recently has Apple even set up a special support mechanism for their enterprise customers. Previous to this point, when you called up apple with a server problem you would never get anyone on the phone that understood servers. One time I called up to get a drive replaced on warranty. The drive (in a RAID-5 array) had not failed, but the yellow warning light had come on, indicating that a failure was likely. After describing the situation to the support rep, he asked me if I had put the disk back in to see if it would go back to a green light. I was flabbergasted. I gently told him that no, I could not do that. This was a mission-critical server and that once the disk had even so much as blinked, it had to be replaced (I had already inserted the spare at that point). I was unable to get the service rep to budge, so I had to escalate the issue through our local education rep and finally got the warranty replacement.
Other major issues we have had stem from the fact that Apple wants us to reboot our computer every couple of weeks. Uptime longer than a month or so is impossible with Apple. We've told our Apple reps that this is unacceptable but they've said we just have to live with the fact that Apple focuses on consumers mainly and for them a reboot is acceptable for almost every update. If you though Microsoft Windows was bad about reboots in the past, Apple is worse.
Finally, despite Apple using Open Source as a marketing point, and despite the fact that Apple bundles a lot of OSS with their OS, Apple is not an Open Source company in any form. Their bundles of OSS are done in way that makes it impossible to recompile or replace components yourself. For example, although they ship OpenLDAP, it is deeply integrated into other Apple components and you cannot fix bugs yourself or upgrade the OpenLDAP component (much of the source is there, but it is not buildable). We ran into some very nasty bugs in Panther server with the hacks they did to OpenLDAP. Bugs that would completely deadlock the server every week and require a hard reset. It took us a year of fighting with Apple to get them to acknowledge that there was a bug. And this was only after another customer spend weeks building a script that would hammer the server and illustrate the bug. Apple finally released a fix for this in 10.3.6 or 7 I think, after it had been reported back at 10.3.3, about a year earlier. And of course by this time, Apple's engineers were hard at work on Tiger, so they didn't really even want to go back and touch panther again. Right about the time Apple released Tiger Server, I complained about some chronic NFS file locking problems in Panther Server (10.3.9) to Apple and they said simply, just upgrade to Tiger. I told them that wasn't possible as it was a production server and I couldn't upgrade it midstream like that, but in Apple's eyes, I'm out of luck. Running OS X server is a bit like trying to run Fedora Core on a server. Apple just doesn't want to support any OS version longer than a year or two. I'm finally getting ready to roll out a Tiger server box (my 3 year cycle on the panther server is about up) as it fixes numerous issues I've been having, but it is not a trivial migration. Plus I've heard a lot of reports that Samba just doesn't work under load on Tiger Server. So that really leaves me in a bit of a bind.
Fortunately we're about to replace the main file server and we're taking bids from other vendors. Right now we're looking at some new Apple RAID arrays, because the price is right, but we're not going to be running OS X server at all. It will definitely be linux on a Dell or HP server. Also Sun is pricing out some hardware that is a whole grade above Apple's RAID at a price that nearly matches Apple's
Apple has not, and still does not, get the enterprise.
While Apple has been *extremely slowly* working to provide enterprise services (Apple's enterprise-specific phone support options are extremely improved, particularly the Preferred and Alliance levels), there are other areas that are still sorely lacking. Currently, we use AppleCare Enterprise Help Desk support, and have been fairly satisfied.
Apple does now offer 24x7 and 4 hour on-site service and support plans, and matches fairly well, most of the time, with our other vendors (primarily Dell, Sun, and IBM).
Where we get killed is on any kind of roadmap or planning information.
At Macworld San Francisco 2004, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which used to be the largest Mac site in the world, talked about what they learned integrating Macs in their enterprise. I've made the presentation available here. I recommend people take a look at it, as it covers other issues as well. Like many organizations, Apple suffered during the late 90s, when it wasn't clear what Apple's direction was, and when Apple's future seemed uncertain. This meant that LLNL went from having 14000 Macs in 1997 to having about half that in 2003. In the meantime, the Windows installed base increased commensurately. (I believe that since then, we've gone to being one of the largest Mac sites outside of Apple, with well over 10000 institutionally-owned Macs, and many Apple server and storage products both deployed centrally and around the campus. Some examples.)
What is one of LLNL's top recommendations for Apple?
Develop a working balance between Apple's needed "confidentiality" and Corporate IT's need of "roadmap" information
This balance, or lack thereof, is also listed as one of their top "difficulties" when working with Apple. And I couldn't agree more.
You touched on some other issues related to software development, integration of OSS components into the OS, acknowledgment of and tracking of bugs, bug fixes being pushed out to next major releases of the operating system (e.g., 10.3.x -> 10.4), and so on. One small victory has been that Apple does now provide semi-detailed information about security updates, and does provide security updates for the previous major version of the OS.
However, the list of deficiencies is much longer. At WWDC, pretty much the only information we get is with regard to software development (and to be fair, that's all the original article actually refers to). We get virtually no information on hardware futures. We don't need to see pictures or know exactly what speed something will be. We want to know where Apple's headed. What form will the Intel servers take? We don't want to find out the DAY they ship. Will they use multiple cores? How many? Which architectures? Will they finally have redundant power supplies? How many drive bays will they have? How many expansion slots, and what kind of expansion? Will the Xserve RAID transition to SATA? Will Apple provide onboard video on the Xserve? Will there be an expansion beyond light-duty servers? How will they integrate into our existing management infrastructure? Will Mac OS X Server make provisions for virtualization of multiple instances of Mac OS X/Mac OS X Server? Where is Apple going with Darwin? What is the EOL schedule for Mac OS X/Mac OS X Server? (Apple still makes NO INFORMATION available about official end-of-life or end-of-support for any versions of Mac OS X or Mac OS X Server. We just have to guess that the previous major version of Mac OS X is what's supported.) How long will PowerPC be supported? This list goes on and on and on and on.
Yes, you can glean and infer some of this stuff unofficially from things happening in th