Article:		Jaguar: Time to Stop Pussyfooting Around
Subject:		Apple has out-MS'ed MS.
Date:		2002-08-05 13:39:26
From:		techx
I am the technician at a library. Given our limited funds, adopting 10.2 is simply not an option. I can understand paying the full price for a full OS upgrade, as we did from ASIP to OSXS 1.x (which was highway robbery, a very poor OS), and from that to OSXS 10.x. Those were full OS upgrades. Jaguar is a point upgrade. Yes, it has some nice features, but I don't give a damn about 90% of them, LDAP is about the only thing I like beyond /bug fixes/ for my current OS. And to implement many of those fixes, I will not only have to pay full price for a server OS, but buy a full price desktop OS for every public and staff machine in the library, and we were just getting up to speed upgrading to OSX for the staff. It may be easy for you to say stop complaining about pricing, and missing features, and poor marketing, but that's reality, pal. I love OSX, and I am dying to run an all-Jaguar network, but it will never happen, short of Apple doing some price cuts or donations (like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which donated 4 p4 1.4's and an NT server box to almost every library in the country). I am aware Apple is moving into the enterprise field (I won't get into that debate), but are they forgetting their academic roots? We have limited budgets, and the folks who actually SUPPORT Apple by buying into their new technology are getting reamed, first by OSXS 1.x, now by Jaguar. I've been burned once, I won't be again. Our plan for now is to make as many things work as we can under 10.1.5 and then sit it out until 11.x. But we can't forecast very well with Apple's habit of placing NDAs over anything they work on. And mac fanatics say M$ is bad? Wow.

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

• Apple has out-MS'ed MS.
  2002-08-06 11:37:49  clvrmnky [Reply | View]
  
  
  Doesn't Apple offer multi-user licenses for precisely this kind of situation? My understanding was that you can get 5 or more licenses for academic or enterprise use, and that these licenses often have a special upgrade discount for later releases.
  
  Note that I actually haven't researched this. I just ran across a mention on apple.com.
  
  Of course, it is common practice for larger install bases to hold back from upgrading to the latest/greatest. This is often a wise decision. The main point (in relation to the original article) is that you already have the majority of your machines at OS X.
  
  Upgrade to 10.2 once the kinks have been worked out.

• Apple has out-MS'ed MS.
  2002-08-05 16:53:09  tychay [Reply | View]
  
  
  There is an educational price for the OSX upgrade at around $70 which a library might qualify for. For multiple machines I think there are maintenance agreements that will keep your machines up-to-date for years (check Apple for the pricing which I think is based on the number of users: I'm guessin a Library has only one user account for the public).
  
  As for the server OS, if you are using an Apple rack mounted server, I heard the OS X Server upgrade was insanely cheap ($10 or so). I imagine that there is/was some maintenance policy in effect for this software also if you are running it on some other computer.
  
  For the record, I'm not enthusiastic about the pricing. If we are comparing Apple to Microsoft using something like Red Hat as the baseline, we see that in pricing of hardware+OS and upgrade pricing, Apple is closer to the latter than the former. As for the donation of Pentium boxes... well Microsoft makes more in profit that Apple makes, and the connection between Bill and Melinda Gates and Microsoft is no secret: sounds more like a charity being co-opted to further a business end of increased market penetration, than it does out of any good will on the foundation's part. Sad.