Supporting Snow Leopard: The ISV Litmus Test

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

It has been over a month since Apple released Mac OS X 10.6 aka "Snow Leopard." Centrify worked hard to deliver "day 1" support for the platform, but it appears given press reports that other ISVs are still struggling to deliver supported bits for customers who are now buying Macs that has Snow Leopard pre-loaded. Given that Centrify has already had well over 50 customers request from us and get our Snow Leopard support in the last few weeks, it appears to me that having Snow Leopard is the ultimate test for an ISV: are you serious about the Mac platform or not?

Now granted, Apple does not make it easy to support its platform as compared to Microsoft, who gives ISVs plenty of runway to support a new release. As CIO Magazine noted in this article entitled "Mac Engineers Lament Snow Leopard in the Enterprise":

"Mac engineers and software developers are not given enough advance notice to certify Apple products; they get their hands on new Apple products along with everyone else, as part of Apple's "secrecy" marketing strategy to create mystery and excitement around new releases."

One could argue that Apple does provide betas/early releases of Snow Leopard for an ISV and internal IT to test out, but Centrify has historically found with the Mac platform there is meaningful deltas between the last preview release and the final GA release that just testing your software against a preview release is not good enough, i.e. you literally have to test each and every OS version from Apple that comes out.

But just because something is hard does not mean it is insurmountable, and if an ISV is really serious about supporting customers who have Macs the ISV should be supporting Snow Leopard by now - it has been over a month. I am still surprised to hear about the vendors whose sole platform they support is the Mac platform still not having Snow Leopard support yet - it is not like they are trying to keep up with 200 flavors of UNIX and Linux that we have to deal with. Or the vendors who one day promise to deliver support by mid-September and then the very next day say they will give it you in mid-October - don't they realize that customers deployment schedules are dependent on being given accurate deliver dates?

This is not like UNIX or Linux server software, where customers will schedule months in advance an upgrade, after doing comprehensive third-party software testing, etc. What we are talking about is pre-loaded desktop software, so if an end user goes out and buys a Mac today from the Apple store it will have Snow Leopard on it. And the end user will need robust AD and Group Policy integration in their corporate network the minute they bring it into the office, and if the third party AD integration software does not support Snow Leopard, then why did you buy that vendor's software to begin with?

The bottom line in my mind is that if an ISV still does not have support one month after a major new release of Mac OS X, they are not taking the Apple market (and you, the customer) seriously. I am not saying it was easy for Centrify to deliver day 1 support for Snow Leopard, and a bunch of great engineers pulled some all nighters to make it happen, but I think in the end our customers are appreciative that we understood that any new Macs coming into their network would have it and would need our stuff to support it.

P.S. Speaking of Macs in the enterprise, check out this webinar to be held on October 8th on how to reduce the costs of managing and administering Mac home directories by using Group Logic's ExtremeZ-IP Server and Centrify DirectControl for Mac OS X to deploy them on Windows servers. Click here to register or for more information.

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