I commented on the original article as well and see if mine comment gets moderated or not. Here is the full text with some spelling correction
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Apple is run like a huge startup (and the remote app was written by 1 guy)
61–70 of 102 posts
Re: Apple is run like a huge startup (and the remote app was written by 1 guy)
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows Live, Bing, Xbox, Servers, Cloud Services Did you have any examples that contradicted me? All of the above are losing MS money in a BIG way.
Um, not to get all defensive, but we at STB are making quite a bit of money. It's probably over a million a quarter per developer. I don't know many people who can say that. ;)
Server and Tools Business?
Re: Apple is run like a huge startup (and the remote app was written by 1 guy)
#63Maybe that's the problem at Microsoft: they think they can solve problems by throwing lots of people at them. They put together large teams to build products. And large teams require managers. I didn't know Microsoft had a problem, they seem to be doing pretty well. They have some good products. Apple being successful doesn't necessarily translate to Microsoft sucking. They are both damn good companies.
I didn't know Microsoft had a problem, they seem to be doing pretty well. In the mobile market? How about anything next-generation web? Social media? Microsoft doesn't seem to be doing well anywhere except the increasingly unimportant desktop and Office suite space.
How about Xbox, Xbox Live and most recently Kinect? Xbox Live crossed billion in revenue and Kinect also is expected to sell millions hitting billion mark in a few months?
Also Bing came around doing extremely good. I wish people look at the positives as much as the negatives. No one talks about failure of Apple TV or the failure of Newton etc http://thecaseagainstapple.blogspot.com/
Re: Apple is run like a huge startup (and the remote app was written by 1 guy)
#64I am reminded of one of the companies from Neuromancer. Was it Maas-Neotek? Gibson described most large companies as being composed mostly of flab, with a few hard bits of "edge." But there was this one large company that was all edge. It was a predator amongst its peers.
For awhile Apple was just eating everyone's lunch because they were the only ones who understood end-to-end User Experience.
Apple's stated strategy for quite awhile was having the computer as the "digital hub." The target was clearly a merging of all media with the computing experience. Can you imagine what Microsoft could've done with XBox if they had UX and vision in the same league as Apple? It was like they already had troops dug in place in the key strategic spot. Apple would've been crushed. Instead, Apple walked all over them.
Re: Apple is run like a huge startup (and the remote app was written by 1 guy)
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stagnate? Snow Leopard is just under a year old. I wouldn't expect a desktop OS to have a same release frequency as a mobile os.
Just over a year old, and just past two years since Apple first showed it at WWDC 2008. Snow Leopard was a relatively minor upgrade even by Apple's admission (hence the price tag $100 lower than for previous iterations), yet it still suffered delays because of work on iOS. Meanwhile, there was zero mention of anything Macintosh at WWDC this year, meaning we're probably at least a year off from any real news at 10.7,…
To be honest, what more do you want to see in it? Perhaps Apple should go down Microsoft's route, and add more and more stuff until it looks and acts ridiculously.
I hope it does not.
Re: Apple is run like a huge startup (and the remote app was written by 1 guy)
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows Live, Bing, Xbox, Servers, Cloud Services Did you have any examples that contradicted me? All of the above are losing MS money in a BIG way.
Um, not to get all defensive, but we at STB are making quite a bit of money. It's probably over a million a quarter per developer. I don't know many people who can say that. ;)
Are you only including developers, or all the people who work on a product? I imagine that MS has a rather large team of non-developers working on products as well.
You want to be careful with that metric. You know the cleaners don't make much money, why not fire them?
Re: Apple is run like a huge startup (and the remote app was written by 1 guy)
#67Maybe that's the problem at Microsoft: they think they can solve problems by throwing lots of people at them.
No they don't.
Re: Apple is run like a huge startup (and the remote app was written by 1 guy)
#68This article, like many others, seems to overestimate how large the actual numbers of developers is at Microsoft, as opposed to full teams with Test and mgmt and their associated marketing, sales, etc. organizations. The .NET GC was roughly 1 person (sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more). Most of the base class libraries were one person. Even larger things, like the text editor, were usually a senior pers…
FWIW I heard a story of the "Find Dialog" (Ctrl-F) in Excel being written by a separate team of several people that included few developers, few testers, a project manager and a technical writer. It was in '94 and it was told by a guy who presumably left MS not long ago in the context of describing the benefits of the COM.
Re: Apple is run like a huge startup (and the remote app was written by 1 guy)
#69The iBooks app, too, with all the sexy page turning animation was written by one guy (before it became big).
As a UI developer with about 5 years of experience, that seems about right to me. I think I could have written that app given about 8 months. Heck, I suspect that the page turning animation was a relatively small part of the development.
I don't consider myself a fantastic developer either. I'd be suspicious of any developer with a few years experience who couldn't write an application like that given the right amount of time and motivation.
This isn't to belittle your comment, just that I'm thinking to myself "yeah, that sound correct".
Re: Apple is run like a huge startup (and the remote app was written by 1 guy)
#70The iBooks app, too, with all the sexy page turning animation was written by one guy (before it became big).
As a UI developer with about 5 years of experience, that seems about right to me. I think I could have written that app given about 8 months. Heck, I suspect that the page turning animation was a relatively small part of the development. I don't consider myself a fantastic developer either. I'd be suspicious of any developer with a few years experience who couldn't write an application like that given the right amoun…
I think more interesting than the fact that one guy wrote the entire application is that Apple gave one guy the time and space to create the application on his own.