> I have accepted that I have to ride at the back of the bus, but I would like that to be inside.
Understood. As one of the "mechanics" of the bus, my typical ride is in the engine compartment or beneath it all. But I knew that when I signed on, and I rather enjoy it.
Here is the story from my point of view.
Apple badly needed to rennovate their OS, so they did. In doing so, they invalidated most of the work already done to support it. NI has spent the money to port LV to this totally new OS. Being an application, we were able to reuse a decent amount of our code, but it still took quite a bit of time and money. It will take more than a handful of LV purchases on OSX to go from red to black, but NI did the port anyway.
Drivers are not application SW, and don't get to reuse nearly as much code from the old driver. And to be honest, they wouldn't want to. The driver groups long ago started working on DAQmx, making it a more nimble, more componentized, and more portable driver architecture. It was a very big investment, so the goals became more and more focused -- meaning that DAQmx is only available for Windows.
Some drivers and some I/O is already available for OSX, but not all. The decision to port a particular driver to OSX will come down to how much technical effort is required, and a forecast of how many can be sold.
In the meantime, the way to do I/O with NI HW on OSX has been spelled out. It was conceived in part by looking at the users that had VXI chassis with a Mac acting as the UI front end, and this solution is a good migration path for them. It isn't as good for the person with a simpler system that doesn't need or want RT, but that was the only technical solution available at the time. With the release of LV7, there is now register level programming support as well. Again, a good solution for some, not for others.
> The high handedness and total lack of concern by NI has shown that the support is not reciprocal.
I'm not sure what was expected or how you reached this conclusion. Within NI, there was much fretting about what the technical solutions were and estimating the cost of those solutions. Marketing and sales was given the not-so-pleasent task of being the primary delivery path for this news.
If you have more comments on how the strategy was delivered, you can voice them, but going forward, the decision will be market driven to an extent. Many people within NI like Apple products and believe that it now has a super OS. But it is difficult to decide not to work on a sure thing in order to gamble on an OSX product. NI had a great excuse to drop all Mac products when OSX was released. They made the investment to release a number of products and are still investing in the OSX product line.
Greg McKaskle
