Re: WO 5.3 Deployment OS X only concerns

On Jun 13, 2005, at 10:18 AM, [email protected] wrote:

> On Jun 13, 2005, at 7:04 AM, Wade Price wrote:
>
>> Does anybody have any concerns now that WebObjects 5.3 deployment is 
>> only officially supported on OS X?
>
> We've discussed it a bit over on the webobjects-dev list.
>
> Most people seem to be ok with it and view it as a reasonable move by 
> Apple to sell more hardware.  Some of us who are selling (or in my 
> case, thinking about selling) WO apps to customers who are not already 
> hooked on Apple find the decision a bit more unsettling.  It's going 
> to be a tough sell to tell someone that in order to use our app they 
> have to buy a fairly expensive server that runs a flavor of Unix 
> that's non-subtly different (from an admin point of view) from 
> anything else they have.  If selling more hardware is the goal then I 
> expect it will fail;   the extra XServes sold for WO deployment will 
> be offset (IMHO) by those that are never sold because the customer was 
> unable to try out WO on hardware they already have before going Apple 
> all the way.
>
> My personal opinion is that the point is not to sell hardware but to 
> make life more productive for Apple's internal WO developers.  This 
> move gives them a big improvement in their development tools and opens 
> the door for them to make enhancements to WO that will only work on OS 
> X.  This means, of course, that even the option of running unsupported 
> on other platforms may not be available for very long.
>
That is the impression that I came away from WWDC with.  It is not that 
Apple wants to lock you into OSX but that they don't want to spend 
staff time on qualifying and supporting the other platforms when that 
time could be used to drive the product forward.  I think, for Apple, 
that is a reasonable thing to do.  Contrasted with their other efforts 
to sell the XServe etc., any affect of WebObjects on sales is 
irrelevant at this point.


> As always, Apple remains inscrutable and we'll just have to see what 
> they end up doing.
>
Yes.  Inscrutable.  I like that!  Apple.  Think Different.  Be 
Inscrutable.
:-P

Chuck

-- 
Practical WebObjects - a book for intermediate WebObjects developers 
who want to increase their overall knowledge of WebObjects, or those 
who are trying to solve specific application development problems.
http://www.global-village.net/products/practical_webobjects