Fair Warning to Small Business Owners About Lion OS X Upgrade
While the Lion OS X upgrade hasn’t been released to the clamoring public just yet, there’s enough information out there from developers who’ve had their hands on it for a few months to give us a peek into what’s coming down the pike. Most of it is pretty exciting, but there’s one little tidbit that’s really bad news.
In preparing an article for my non-techie audience, “Apple’s Lion OS X for Mac is Coming. Are You Prepared?,” I learned that Lion will no longer support Rosetta, the emulator than enabled previous versions of OS X to run PowerPC code.
What does this mean? Microsoft’s Office:mac, Quicken, and Photoshop run on PowerPC and are just a few of the important applications that will entirely disappear from a computer when Lion is installed, as will the ability to reach down into old files to read docs created in those applications.
Since a majority of small business owners use any one, if not all, of the aforementioned apps, does Apple really want to leave this group behind? What are they thinking?
Small business owners usually handle most of the office functions necessary to keep their businesses going themselves, especially in these challenging economic times. Many of these hardworking people know just enough about their computers to be functional and get the necessary work done. Excel spreadsheets, Quicken bookkeeping, contracts, and Word docs may be the full extent of what they know how to do. The rest is a confusing mystery, but they doggedly plow on, performing necessary updates to stay as current as possible.
With the introduction of Lion, they might unknowingly eradicate the very documents that are the lifeblood of their businesses.
I believe that, like cigarettes with dire health warnings from the Surgeon General shown boldly on the package, there should be a huge notification, outlined in red, underlined and in bold face type that warns people about the hazards of downloading and installing this software, otherwise unsuspecting though enthusiastic users of Apple’s products might inadvertently wipe out the documented history of their clients and take their businesses down with it.
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