Over the weekend, a friend asked me what I think about MacOSX Lion (he knows we are a Mac-only shop). My answer surprised him: We have not even begun to evaluate it.
I took the opportunity to run him through our upgrade policy, which can be depicted nicely as an infographic:
Essentially, our Macs fall into three categories:
- Production Critical Systems, where we do all the heavy lifting for our clients. If these systems don't work, we not only face missed milestones, but probably some very serious time rebuilding the machines. Thus, we are most carefully when upgrading these.
- Production Systems, for tasks such as writing, emailing or billing. While essential, we can easily switch these tasks to other hardware, with only minor (or no) impact on milestones.
- Test Systems, which is hardware that is not in daily use and can therefore be used to test before we deploy in our production environment.
In an environment like this, OS upgrades are the hardest to pull off. During a brief stint in the data center world, I learned that you should never upgrade the OS of critical systems until at least 6 months after the upgrade was released. Similarly, we don't even touch a new OS until the first maintenance release and don't put it in production until the second maintenance release. In other words, let others find and worry about bugs.
In the case of OSX 10.7 Lion, we felt that the first maintenance release was so small, that we would wait for the second maintenance release before starting to test. Also, we aren't in dire need for any of the new features, so if in doubt, we'd rather sit it out a bit longer than jump in too early.
That's why we have not even begun testing Lion.
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