The Unofficial Apple Weblog (don’t we all wish there was an official one) had a story a while back about some engineer whose company was showcasing their product at MacWorld Boston using the phrase “stuck using Mac OS X Server”.
Laurie Duncan, the author, was appropriately shocked:
The highlight of the day gets filed under the “How not to pitch your product at a Mac user’s conference” heading. And the answer is, by prefacing your answer with “If you’re stuck using OS X Server…” Duly filed under “Don’t let your engineers talk to potential customers – if you want their business.”
And she’s right. You don’t talk that way to clients – especially when they’re likely to be Apple fans.
But the engineer is probably right too. Mac OS X Server has some issues as a file server. Namely, slowness. After a certain load, in my experience, it just kind of sits down and cries. We’ve had a Mac OS X file server running in a intensely mission critical, high volume, high load environment all summer now, and it’s given us fairly constant grief during the busy times.