AppleThis article by George OU on ZDNet has just made me laugh out loud !
George claims that Apple’s launch of 4 versions of OSX over the last 5 years is a bad thing and Microsoft ( who havent really launched a major desktop OS release since Windows 2000 - XP was just a glossy layer on top of Win2K in reality with little new functionality ) are doing everyone a favour by putting lots of time in between releases !

This is zealotry at its most hilarious, how you can turn the complete failure of a company as large as Microsoft to deliver on its target release dates into a positive spin is beyond me. He goes on further to try to compare the release of Microsofts Service Pack’s ( read Bug Fixes ) with Apples major OS X releases from 10.3 to 10.4 etc, and claims that Bill is saving everyone loads of money by not making us buy Service Packs, whereas Steve is fleecing his loyal customers by packaging OS updates at $100+ a time !

Excuse me while I ROFL !

Now, don’t get me wrong… I do take George’s point about not wanting to roll out a new OS to Corporate PC’s every year ( I am an IT manager in charge of supporting 3,000+ Windows PC’s so I do agree with him on that one ), however I do think even here George misses the point completely. Unlike with Windows, OS X will happily work on a whole range of Mac’s and each annual release can co-exist with the others, the only real driver to continue on the upgrade path is to keep abreast of latest features and security fixes. Also the comparison of upgrading a Mac from 10.3 to 10.4 with upgrading a PC from Windows XP to Vista is not comparing like with like in any way at all. Apple upgrades work… Seamlessly… Microsoft have yet to even release a Vista upgrade for beta testing ( current Vista releases require a clean install )

I must say I am really looking forward now to seeing the feature set of OSX Leopard when it is announced in August, and I am fairly confident that Mr Jobs is going to once again Wow the audience ( and the tech world ) with another major step forward in desktop computing…