“On April 12th, Apple announced that Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard, will be delayed from the original ‘Spring 2007’ ship date. Now it won’t ship until October,” John Martellaro writes for The Mac Observer.
“Considering that Apple had until June 21st (1806 UT) to ship Leopard, this is only a four month delay. In terms of OS releases, in general, this is no big deal some have said,” Martellaro writes.
“Well, yes it is,” Martellaro writes. “It’s actually a big deal because Apple had it within its power to avoid this setback.”
Martellaro writes, “Apple could have avoided this Leopard delay with good old fashioned management leadership. They could have allowed themselves to grow and mature a little. They could have empowered their key VPs to figure out what it would take to ship Mac OS X/Leopard on time, with excellence and exercise some authority. Unfortunately, many of Apple’s key VPs aren’t Lieutenant Generals. They’re Lieutenant Colonels.”
“Alas, Apple’s psychology and operating style is trapped in the $6B Valley of Death syndrome and not moving into a 21st century consumer electronics company that’s poised to move from $25B to, perhaps, $40B in just a few years,” Martellaro writes. “To get there in good shape, Apple will have to spend some money on something besides a half billion dollar new campus, forget the ghosts of the Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio eras, empower their VPs, and let their VPs become responsible for their own products, staff and OPEX.”
Full article – highly recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “LinuxGuy and Mac Prodigal Son” for the heads up.]
Martellaro, as usual, makes a lot of sense. Obviously, Jobs knows what he’s doing, but nobody’s perfect. The bottom line is that the failure of Leopard to ship when promised is a failure. Perhaps it’s a minor failure, maybe just a one-time failure, but it’s a failure nonetheless.
Related articles:
Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard delay is a (somewhat) big deal – April 16, 2007
Apple buys 9 more acres in Cupertino – April 14, 2007
Apple’s latest Mac OS X Leopard build shows unified interface, buh-bye brushed-metal – April 14, 2007
eWeek’s Morgenstern: Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard delay is no big whoop – April 13, 2007
InformationWeek blows it again: reports second delay of Leopard this year due to Vista compatibility – April 13, 2007
Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Piper Jaffray: Use Apple’s Leopard delay as buying opportunity – April 13, 2007
Analysts unconcerned over Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard delay – April 13, 2007
Apple delays Mac OS X Leopard until October 2007, blames iPhone – April 12, 2007
Latest Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard build still accompanied by lengthy bug list – April 12, 2007
RUMOR: Apple to release Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in June – April 02, 2007
Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard to feature ZFS? – March 29, 2007
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard’s top secret ingredient: 3D everywhere, including new 3D Finder? – March 27, 2007
Apple to delay Leopard? Digitimes.com’s poor Apple rumor accuracy – March 23, 2007
Apple to postpone Mac OS X Leopard until October in order to support Windows Vista? – March 23, 2007
RUMOR: Some Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard ‘top secret’ features leak out – January 26, 2007
RUMOR: Apple Mac OS X Leopard to replace ‘Aqua’ with ‘Illuminous’ – December 11, 2006
Apple confirms ‘resolution independence’ and more coming in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard – October 23, 2006
Cost of Apple’s second 50-acre Cupertino campus could top $500 million – April 25, 2006
Video: Steve Jobs meets Cupertino City Council – April 22, 2006
Transcript: Apple CEO Steve Jobs addresses the Cupertino City Council – April 20, 2006
Apple CEO Steve Jobs plans new 50-acre campus in California – April 19, 2006
Who cares how late Leopard is, as long as it’s properly developed and works without major glitches right out of the box. Four months isn’t that long to achieve that.
How often can Microsoft say their OS manages to do that..?
If you give power to Veeps and then pressure them for results, guess what happens. You get bug ridden software (Vista) and poorly thought out products (Zune). In either case, the oOverseer did not have confidence in the ‘final’ product.
Is the release a failure, perhaps. But failures like that occur when you want to produce quality. I do not mind waiting (although I wish I didn’t have to). So easy to criticize the do-ers of this world.
Martellaro writes. “It’s actually a big deal because Apple had it within its power to avoid this setback.
“Apple could have avoided this Leopard delay with good old fashioned management leadership. They could have allowed themselves to grow and mature a little. They could have empowered their key VPs to figure out what it would take to ship Mac OS X/Leopard on time, with excellence and exercise some authority.
Who the FSCK is this guy?
First off there are a lot of things with Lepoard that the public is not informed about. There are a lot of things deeply inbedded in Lepoard that depend upon outside factors which is out of Apple’s control. These outside factors have changed which has influenced how and when Apple can release their next version of their OS.
For instance the hackers are chopping the hell out of AACS copy protection scheme designed to protect BlueRay DVD’s. The MIAA is pissed and if it can’t be made secure, we might never see BlueRay DVD movies on our computer screens. This will afffect Apple sales of Apple TV because no way in hell will the MIAA release HD content for iTMS unless the content can be made secure.
Anyone who has seen iTMS content on their HD screen can attest to the poor quality.
Another factor is the tons of third party software that wants a toehold on the new iPhone. Apple has to make sure this software works correctly and doesn’t cheapen the experience of a totally new approach to mobile computing.
So Apple is under pressure being the market innovator that’s a fact, somethings have been shuffled arround and delayed a bit, it’s no big deal.
Remmember Microsoft delayed their Vista for YEARS and Apple only delayed their UPGRADE for a few months, big difference
All of this talk of failures or reasons for delay on Leopard is a just a bunch of FUD! and MDN seems to feed off of it like a lot of beavers! Moving on!
John Martellaro seems to think that applying microsh*t management principles to Apple will work better. I happen to agree with most of the posts and call BULLSHIT as well. I don’t recall anything like this when mafiasoft delayed longhorn the first of many times. I think we don’t need to fix something that’s not broken. It may need some maintenance but I think SJ is in the best position to decide what maintenance is needed, if any.
MW=issue. As in I don’t think this is an issue.
His Steveness is a control freak.
Apple missed a chance to kill Vista.
You cuys who say “we dont care as long as it’s perfect and not buggy” are blinded apple fanboys.
Admit it, Apple made a mistake.
Even MDN can admit that.
Growing a company is one of the most difficult things to do.
Having an egoistic, only I can make decisions, who is involved with every tiny decision in products, such as theSteve is, can not work in the long run.
It may work in a small boutique shop with a small range of similar products, but not in rapidly growing and expanding business such as Apple hopes to be.
Wasn´t theSteve ousted before because he couldn´t grow Apple properly?
MDN: Martellaro, as usual, makes a lot of sense.
Oh, really? This armchair general makes it sound awfully easy how HE would have handled things. But where is HIS $80 billion valuation company? This is pure conjecture, with zero evidence to back it up.
Others have pointed out that software development often hits snags, even with good management. (This has been my experience as well.)
But beyond that, there’s no executive advice more brain-dead easy to give than “delegate more.” But, plenty of CEOs who delegate a lot more than Jobs are far less successful. And most observers have pointed out that Jobs’ attention to detail is one of Apple’s core strengths, to the point that there’s a lot of worry about replacing Jobs. Deciding to change Apple’s very successful recipe for management because of one little 4-month blip in the middle of a fabulous, multi-year growth spurt is a LOT tougher call than Martellaro makes it out to be. That’s not to say that some careful evolution isn’t worth looking at as Apple grows, but the old adage about not throwing out the baby with the bath water seems quite apropos.
Bah, this sounds like a columnist who has to pretend to write “profound” columns regularly to earn his paycheck. To paraphrase Jobs, some of the best decisions are the paths/products/advice we REFUSE to implement.
MW: “effects”–we should think carefully about the effects before tossing out a proven approach
Hmmm, it occurs to me that just maybe we should trust Steve Jobs. Apple learned long ago (Pirates of silicon valley) that you have to have politics with your business.
Apple is doing lots more with its people than HP and Microsoft. Its call “bloatware” and it drags down profit and makes it harder to do business.
JMHO.
en
The Leopard delay could be due to any number of reasons. It could well be delayed because of third-party hardware component suppliers not being ready. I’m thinking about the ‘top secret’ part of Leopard. Say it IS multi-touch to some degree – it will need monitors ready to ship IMMEDIATELY to make use of this ground-breaking feature… otherwise a revolutionary OS will go out the door – with all Apple’s fanfare on the future of computing – and no one will be able to use it. A bit like the Adobe UB lag, only a hundred times more damaging to Apple.
Creating the future doesn’t always work to normal guidelines for management or leadership practices…
Completely pathetic analysis in my opinion.
I hope Jobs and everyone at Apple are ignoring all this waffle.
I would rather wait for a good product, rather than have a neutered product like Vista. Does it look good? No. Has it been good for the stock? No.
Will it be best for users? Most likely, yes.
Apple may need to beef up its staffing instead of buying real estate. They are obviously spread a little thin with Apple TV, the iPhone, and Leopard. On top of that new Final Cut products, and other hardware business.
This has always been a lean company. They are expanding their product line to a degree that lean does not support such growth.
‘His Steveness is a control freak.’
Better than being an out of control freak.
Also, Al Gore, we all know that it is software that is CAUSING global warming-mainly from Microsoft……
1) SJ could have increased the head count to meet the artificial deadline and then lay them off after iPhones ship 4 month from now.
or
2) He could delay one of the product by 4 months and provide job security for his people.
What should he do?
Most CEOs in US have chosen Option 1 to keep Wall Street happy.
Shipping something before it is ready is a failure. Having the courage to slip a ship date knowing you will catch a lot of flack is leadership.
It’s quite possible that Apple made two decisions since Jan that made them favor the Leopard delay:
1. Open up the iPhone to more developers so as to have more software available upon release, thus requiring more support from OS engineers.
2. Spend more time to get Leopard more fully developed and debugged because Vista has turned out to be relatively insignificant competition (in other words, no big jump over XP).
I think Steve should stay the course.
Go watch your TV. Every sensible person has already figured out that Apple’s previous removal of Jobs was one of the most idiotic board actions in corporate history. If you can’t even figure that out, why should anyone listen to you?
Jake
I agree with Big Al. There’s a lot of pikers out there who couldn’t run a hot dog stand. Yet, these same people write articles knocking someone or some company.
John Martellaro sounds like my wife. Just because he has an opinion, it doesn’t make him accurate or right.
I have no complaints with Apple. Great hardware and software. Period.
Yes, I agree with the writer. Apple has failed. I want a half baked 10.5.0 release of Leopard so that I can find bugs in it and apply the quickly released 10.5.1 update, only to find that there are more bugs. I will then scream and yell at Apple for not releasing update 10.5.2 to fix the remaining bugs. Yes, I like Apple when they release a half baked OS and then advertise it as the best OS on the planet. Yes, Apple has failed here.
/sarcasm off/
Wiseguy…
This guy is someone that is correct in saying that this delay was not necessary with better management. This is a FACT. If the iPhone was going to require so much resourcing, then this should have been not only estimated, but also MANAGED so as to not delay Leopard.
By the way, Leopard is not “just an upgrade” as you suggest.
Apple has been touting that Leopard is very much a SIGNIFCANT OS release, with features and technolgy way beyond Tiger.
To turn your question around though… If Vista is such a MAJOR leap over XP, and Leopard is ONLY just a simple upgrade (as you have suggested, not me) then YEARS to delay a major release is more understandable than delaying an upgrade at all!!!!???
It was nice to see MDN acknowledge that this is a FAILURE on Apple’s part.
MDN and this Author at The Mac Observer are doing the RIGHT thing by taking Apple to task over this.
If Apple is to become the Microsoft beater you fan(atic) boys aspire to, then it HAS TO become better at managing these sorts of projects, and it CERTAINLY needs to recognise that in the CONSUMER electronics and media business (unlike the PC hardware and software business) delays are NOT an option.
Apple was right to make sure iPhone is out at all costs, in the mobile phone game a few months makes a HUGE difference to the “newness” of you feature set.
However, if they had managed BOTH these projects resourcing appropriately (or at least BETTER) they SHOULD have been anticipating these things, and not promising dates that couldn’t be achieved.
my 2 cents.
Luke
Let me get this straight. More management would have fixed this? Umm…yeah. Right.
Why are their so many posters here at MDN comparing Micorsoft and Apple?
Why does a late delivery of a product by Microsoft give Apple the right to be late in delivery???
What does the delay of an Apple product have to do with Microsoft?
I don´t own a Windows computer. Do you all??? Why are you all obsessed with Microsoft?
Does Ford compare itself to Porsche when it fails or succeeds?
Does Pepsi users whine about Coca-Cola´s late arriving new soda?
Quit the Microsoft vs. Apple comparisons already!!!
Me thinks the tech writers want Apple to release buggy software so that they can bring out the “See, Apple writes crappy OS software, just like Microsoft” cannard. Yes, they want Apple to fail so that Microsoft can compare favorably. Steve is not having any of that, believe me now, listen to me later.