Re: Is the Jaguar user base large enough to still

FROM : Scott Ellsworth
DATE : Thu Apr 14 22:50:59 2005

On Apr 14, 2005, at 1:26 PM, Daniel Child wrote:

> As people mentioned earlier, one's audience is critical [...]


Agreed.

> For universities, the answer is obvious: assuming frequent upgrades 
> would be a mistake. At UH, for instance, there are rooms full of 
> Macs running 9.2, and because the hardware is old, it makes little 
> sense to even upgrade to 10 anything (pick your cat). I believe 
> some of the computer room PCs run XP, but that is simply because 
> the hardware is newer. Others are still stuck on 2000 or 98.


More interesting would be the number of machines running 10.1 or 
10.2.  Many machines running 9.x are not upgraded because doing so 
would be expensive.  For example, more RAM, bigger disk, and if half 
the machines in the room can run 10 and half cannot, often one 
upgrades none.

I know of at least one xserve at a client that is running 10.2, and 
that is going to keep doing so, because the cost of a new copy of 
Server is enough that the owner will try to get a whole new xserve. 
It will cost the same in political capital.

Another thing to be very worried about with edu software is the 
partial upgrade.  My experience has been that universities and k12s 
believe that they should not have to spend money on upgrades of any 
kind, which means they tend to buy a new copy of software for a new 
student or factulty member, but will not upgrade an existing one. 
Make double darn sure that your software handles the _next_ version's 
data files gracefully.

Scott