Sam Berlin wrote:
>It makes plenty sense when you consider that there's planning involved
>with changing the base requirements and releasing new products.
>Determining if and when Apple is going to release a 32bit compatible
>Java6 is one of those planning steps.
I agree: planning is good. But knowing that Apple doesn't usually
pre-announce their plans, what can you do?
If I were in that situation right now, I would want to be looking at hard
data on what machine capabilities my paying customers actually have. If
you don't know that, then you're really shooting in the dark. Not only are
Apple's plans hidden from you, but your own customers' current capabilities
are also hidden. If you don't know how many users would be affected by a
given decision, realistic planning for potential alienation is effectively
impossible.
LimeWire is fundamentally network-oriented, so I see no technical reason
why it can't ping one of your servers with brief info on what its host
platform capabilities are. An HTTP GET request would suffice.
If that presents a customer privacy issue, then let customers enable and
disable it, but then explain how enabling it helps you learn how to serve
them better in the future. If transparency is an issue (i.e. what data the
computer is actually sending) then make it a plain HTTP request, not HTTPS,
so anyone monitoring the ping can see everything in it.
IIRC, either Omni Group or Panic or someone does something like this
already, and has been doing it for a while. I don't think anyone has ever
complained about it, either. The last time I looked at their graph, it was
some time earlier in 10.4 Tiger's life-cycle, and it showed OS version, CPU
arch, and maybe a couple of other data points, like total RAM or CPU speed.
Anyway, the graph nicely showed 10.4 uptake rates (faster than I would have
guessed), as well as transition rates to x86 (also faster than my guess),
all as percentages of users with a particular capability. I wish I could
remember which company it was, because it was a nice example of how a
fairly small amount of data collected from a large number of users over an
extended time period can be very useful for product planning.
-- GG
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