Anyone who knows me will know that I am not much of an Apple fanboi.  I used to own an iPhone 4, but switched to Windows Phone over a year ago and haven’t looked back. I also own a MacBook Pro that solely runs Windows 7.

However, today Apple announced OS X “Mountain Lion” and I am 100% totally blown away at what it represents.

Apple are doing something so very very right in the OS world.  They are transitioning to delivering a traditional PC OS in a cloud world… and doing it well.  Basically this boils down into two things that blow me away:

• Smaller, shorter releases each year
• Cloud features baked into the OS.

Moving to a yearly (min) release cycle with smaller set of features is critical for keeping pace with what is going on in the world.  Being able to take advantage of new services etc…

Baking in the Cloud deeply into the OS e.g. saving/opening to/from iCloud via standard OS open/save dialogs is fantastic & means developers don’t need to do that work in their apps. 

This all might seem very simple and obvious, but doing these two things in software as complex as an OS is no mean feat.

More importantly, getting a company the size of Apple to agree internally, agree on a strategy and push in a direction like this, is in my view, the real accomplishment here.  This will pay dividends for them in the next few years.

I have high hopes for Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 8 to make similar advances.  They just have to.

You can read more about the release here: http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion

-CJ.