A more stable OS strategy should appeal to businesses

Mac OS X Snow Leopard will not be a major shift in terms of user experience and functionality, says Tim Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies. The name Snow Leopard itself suggests that the next Mac OS X won't be a radical departure from its predecessor, Leopard, he notes.

Bajarin likens the expected user experience in upgrading to Snow Leopard to that of installing a Windows service pack, which may offer significant improvements in the OS but doesn't change the user experience or break the application base. "If I'm Apple, I want to get new people in the fold, and I don't want to confuse them with a new OS every 18 months," he says. "Businesses don't want to see a new OS every 18 months because it's very disruptive," Gartenberg agrees.

Both analysts see a method to Apple's slowing down of major Mac OS X releases since the highly disruptive, nearly all-new Mac OS X 10.0 appeared in 2001. That year, Apple released 10.0 Cheetah in March and 10.1 Puma in August. The 10.2 Jaguar version followed in August 2002, and 10.3 Panther shipped in October 2003. Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger took a bit longer, arriving in April 2005, and the current Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard came out after an even longer interval, in October 2007. Snow Leopard is planned to arrive after a similar, roughly two-year interval.

Although Mac OS X has evolved dramatically since its 2001 debut, both Bajarin and Gartenberg note that Apple has very carefully smoothed the transition path from each version to the next, with minimal hiccoughs. "That smooth transition is especially important as the user base grows," Bajarin notes.

The disappointment over the disruptive transition from Windows XP to Windows Vista may make it even easier for businesses to consider adopting Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Already, researchers have noted an uptake in business adoption of the Mac OS. "When you push users off a platform rather than try to pull them in, the first thing they say is that they don't want to go to your destination," Gartenberg says. In that context, "a migration to Mac OS X might not be [more disruptive] than going to Vista or Windows 7," he notes.