Wow. So far, no one has mentioned that developers of Leopard-only apps will only have to QA on one version of the operating system.
Passing a strict (ie, good) QA cycle means thorough testing on all supported platforms. For every platform you add, that's another row or column in the QA matrix. Consider (Intel, PowerPC) * (10.4, 10.5). That's already four supported "platforms".
Dropping Tiger support makes financial sense because a) statistics (both from Omni and those I've observed myself) prove that 90% of the Mac user base upgrades to the latest within a reasonable time frame and b) supporting Tiger adds +100% to your testing load. At some point in time, you'll be spending an extra +100% in testing to gain %10 of the market, which is a crappy investment of your engineering time.
It's really more than 100% effort to support legacy OS versions because in addition to testing, engineering will have to spend time coming up with a plan to support both, implementing new features in just one or both codebases, conditionalizing features, etc., etc...
And if your engineering and QA departments are the same person, well, then, someone clearly doesn't have the time to support the legacy OS. :)
by David Young — Jan 04
Passing a strict (ie, good) QA cycle means thorough testing on all supported platforms. For every platform you add, that's another row or column in the QA matrix. Consider (Intel, PowerPC) * (10.4, 10.5). That's already four supported "platforms".
Dropping Tiger support makes financial sense because a) statistics (both from Omni and those I've observed myself) prove that 90% of the Mac user base upgrades to the latest within a reasonable time frame and b) supporting Tiger adds +100% to your testing load. At some point in time, you'll be spending an extra +100% in testing to gain %10 of the market, which is a crappy investment of your engineering time.
It's really more than 100% effort to support legacy OS versions because in addition to testing, engineering will have to spend time coming up with a plan to support both, implementing new features in just one or both codebases, conditionalizing features, etc., etc...
And if your engineering and QA departments are the same person, well, then, someone clearly doesn't have the time to support the legacy OS. :)