Graffle 5 OS

[Karl Kuehn]

On Feb 28, 2008, at 9:36 PM, Vic DiFranco wrote:

>> 	And this ignores the evidence that OmniGroup has already brought  
>> out a few times that people who don't upgrade their OS are not  
>> (statistically speaking) probable buyers of new software.
>
> 	Hmm. Not sure I follow the reasoning here. If the new software  
> REQUIRES the upgraded OS, then it follows that those who do not  
> upgrade the OS will also not buy the new software. That's not a  
> statistical relationship, but a causative one.

	Back when 10.4 came out OmniGroup put out their statistics about the  
customers who were using OmniWeb 4 (this was when it started phoning  
home). And the people who upgraded to OW 4 were overwhelmingly those  
who had also moved to 10.4 (despite that it ran on 10.3 as well). The  
reasoning was that if you were not willing to spend the money  
upgrading to 10.4, you probably wern't the sort of person who was  
going to be spending much money on buying new software either.

	I think that that is a reasonably good summation of how things work,  
on average. There will always be plenty of exceptions, but exceptions  
are exceptions and not the rule.

> 	At any rate, the programmers have made their decision, and I'm sure  
> have given it a great deal of thought. I certainly am not going to  
> complain to them, who have written such a useful and intuitive  
> application. Perhaps the criticism should go to Apple, for making  
> the OS upgrade one that is not backward compatible.


	Engineering is always about tradeoffs. If Apple brings out something  
new, that is necessarily something that was not present in previous  
versions (by definition). A new feature can't be backwards compatible,  
and a lot of things in 10.5 are brand new frameworks. They just don't  
exist in 10.4, and it makes no economic sense for Apple spend a lot of  
money back-porting them to 10.4 (since they just spent the money  
creating a new and better OS for them to go into).

--
	Karl Kuehn
		larkost at softhome.net