idea deployment.de

Half a year after the launch of Leopard in the last year, Apple announces the launch of the next operating system named “Snow Leopard” for early 2009. In princicple, Apple is following their usual marketing strategy. This is:

• Keep the launch of products quite till the actual release day, then ship fast.
• Don’t discuss about rumors, even try to shut down rumor distributors.
• Update products every few months but keep the actual development closed from public.

Before every release event it seems that half the tech world is anxious knowing what happens, talking and speculating about their new stuff. Thus apple nearly limits their marketing expenses for the existing products while getting the hype for new releases for free.

Now, you could tell that the early adopters are always there after a certain base was established. Might be valid for Apple, yes. But this is not so true for the new operating system:

• Snow Leopard is said to be modified just “under the hood”. In fact, they moved from one software architecture to another while not changing the usage of the programs itself. Mail and other office programs are said to run a bit faster.
• As said before, they announced Snow Leopard already this year. Since they’re already beta testing it they can’t keep it secret.
• They needed an open specification to get hardware manufacturers under one hood, to align them using that specification later on.

So - what do we learn from it? Apple is using this open specification to succeed with their idea of multi-core computing. Apparently a good idea since it is dependent on the software developers using the underlying mechanics of the operating system. Moreover there aren’t any competitors being able to misuse this information.

And: Although Apple was announcing Snow Leopard pretty early, they’re still saving on marketing. It may well be that Snow Leopard will be a minor launch like any other new iPod generation with minor improvements. But I’m having the feeling that they’ll be getting something more out of it. The idea of using every computing unit of a computer (CPUs and graphic processors) is too tempting not to use it as a selling argument. I’m anxious to watch the process next year.