Is Apple Getting Bogged Down Like Microsoft?

Apple (AAPL-NASDAQ) just dropped a bit of news pointing to news about delays in its new Leopard OS launch dates.  Shares closed down 0.4% in regular trading and are down almost 2% at $90.40 after the release.  Does this sound somewhat like the Vista launch at Microsoft (MSFT-NASDAQ).  Here is the statement from the company:

iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS® X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones.

The answer is still almost certainly NO, they aren’t as bogged down as Microsoft or others.  But this shows that rapid growth and major new product launches can come with a cost at even the most inventive and nimblest operators out there.  We’ll have to see what this does to calendar Q3 estimates (Q4 for Apple, therefore year-end and fiscal 2007).  These numbers will have to now be backed out by the street.

Jon C. Ogg
April 12, 2007

Jon Ogg can be reached at [email protected]; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.