Solutions providers are impressed with the potential of Apple’s new Mac OS X, according to a Smart Partner article. However, most providers are waiting to launch widespread deployments with customers.
There aren’t enough drivers yet for Mac OS X, and the application programming interfaces need improvement, The Mac Evangelist’s Shane Anderson told Smart Partner. In fact, The Mac Evangelist Web site is still being run from a Linux server, he said. And then there’s the fact that several software vendors, such as Adobe and Quark, are still in prerelease stage.
However, many Macworld attendees told Smart Partner that they foresaw a turnaround in September, when Apple is expected to release its “first major update” of Mac OS X, version 10.1.
“First came the hardware, and then the OS. The third [phase] will be the drivers and applications,” Anderson told Smart Partner. And he thinks that many publishing concerns are now rethinking earlier decisions to move to Windows NT or 2000, due to the faster multitasking of Mac OS X. Other Macworld attendees pointed to similar sentiments among federal government customers, Smart Partner said.
Users are complaining most audibly about Mac OS X’s lack of support for CD-ROM drives. On the other hand, support from printer original equipment manufacturers is generally much farther along, “except for very high-end models,” Anderson is quoted as saying.
C.V. Rao, who heads up Houston-based C.V. Rao Consultants, predicted that many more OEM and ISV partners will come to the table with the delivery of OS X 10.1. Rao’s customer base revolves around midsize to large graphics companies, as well as graphics departments within large enterprises. Rao sees no problems associated with using Mac OS X in entirely new installations, either by businesses or individual end users, he told Smart Partner.
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