With Snow Leopard, Apple Faces New Challenges

iPhones and iPods are exciting products that essentially market and sell themselves. But articulating the benefits of a new operating system architecture is a much tougher task, and one that Apple (NSDQ:AAPL) will face when it releases OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard,” presumably sometime this summer.

With OS X 10.5 Leopard, Apple simply highlighted the hundreds of new features it bundled into the OS and customers busted out their wallets. But Apple has said that Snow Leopard won’t include a raft of new features, but will instead represent more of an architectural shift.

Getting customers excited about architectural shifts isn’t easy; customers generally don’t react well to major changes to software with which they’ve grown familiar. Just ask Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT), which overhauled the Windows security architecture when it moved from XP to Vista and is still hearing complaints resulting from these changes.

The difficulty of marketing under-the-hood changes could make Snow Leopard a difficult sell initially, said Michael Oh, founder and president of Tech Superpowers, a Boston-based Apple reseller.

Read more: crn.com