The Register reports on the launch of a new patch for Apple’s Mac OS X 10.3, just ten days before the official and bombastic release of the 10.4. This is rather confusing, since the 10.3 update contains some sort of pre-getting-ready-for-the-Tiger-patch. Funky Marketing by Apple?
I’ve been talking this through with Nathan, and we both don’t seem to find any logic in this, to us, commercial suicide. Why would you release an upgrade for all your potential customers ? Wouldn’t it be more logical to release the patch AFTER the Tiger sales have boomed, so that stubburn users who still want to use the .3.9 system and didn’t want to change to the Tiger (.4) can be helped with their little ailments as the Powerbooks scrolling trackpad?
Imagine Microsoft releasing a patch for WinXP, with a lot of extras that will also be featured in Longhorn. Imagine your XP finetuned, with all the little bugs fixed. Why the hell would you go buy Longhorn then? Exactly. Apple just shot down 10 % of it’s opening sales, I’d say.
Unless I get this wrong, this is an example of very bad planning.