Windows.. it's like coming home! 3402

You're buttuming that offering backwards compatibility is a better way to maintain customers than offering great new stuff for them to buy all the time. The truth is, either approach will help you maintain customers, but each attracts *different* customers.

And it's pretty clear which type of customer a company in Apple's position will have more luck attracting. Microsoft is already going after the "compatibility" customers, and this is a good fit for its over-engineered, slow, lumbering approach to software development.

Apple's small size makes it more nimble, and of course its whole corporate image is already built around being out in front. This makes Apple ideally suited to pick up the "progress" customers Microsoft isn't serving. And, of course, people who constantly want new stuff are much more profitable customers. (Both for the platform vendor and for third-party developers, which is one of the reasons the Mac gets developer support out of proportion to its market share.)

Apple offers *backwards* compatibility good enough for its markets. Clbuttic got five years, and in my experience most Mac users never use it anymore.

What Apple is really bad at (or, rather, doesn't even attempt in most cases) is *forwards* compatibility. That is, bothering to make new versions of Final Cut Pro run on old versions of the operating system, back-porting APIs to older systems, etc.

This approach makes sense if you buttume most people on the platform are interested in tracking the latest OS releases, which I think happens to be the case.

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As I've pointed out before, individual users are able to make this transition as slowly as they want to. If you'd wanted to miss most of the hbuttle of the Intel transition, you could have bought a PPC machine and kept it for the next three years, and by the time you moved to Intel, most of your software would probably already be native, and the stuff that wasn't would probably run as fast as it did on what by then would be your three year old PPC box.

All Apple is doing by "rushing" the Intel transition is giving people who want to make the switch faster the *option* to do so. What conceivable interest would be served by Apple e.g. holding quad core Xeon workstations off the market, despite the fact that Final Cut Pro and Shake users would kill for them, because Adobe hadn't released a universal version of Creative Suite yet?

Plus, actually moving all your new sales to the new hardware puts much more pressure on developers to support it right away. I'm very certain that if Apple had announced "We'll be moving to Intel in 2008", the version of Creative Suite shipping next year would still be PPC-only. If the transition took, say, five years instead of two as a result of this (which is not hard to imagine), it would actually be *harder* for individual users to avoid the hbuttles of the transition.

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-- "Those who enter the country illegally violate the law." -- George W. Bush in Tucson, Ariz., Nov. 28, 2005