21–30 of 418 posts
I rarely get problems of that magnitude. The only unreliable thing I have is my ADSL connection and that's not a problem as I can use my phone as a backup.
I've been thinking for some years now, I wish everyone would stop implementing features and perfect the ones that are already there. Optimise. Improve. This is why I was so upset at Sparrow throwing in the towel - they concentrated on one thing, email, and did it better than I'd seen it done before. By specialising they were able to spend the time to get it right.
I've been thinking for some years now, I wish everyone would stop implementing features and perfect the ones that are already there. Look at the iPhone 5 discussions taking place. The most common topic you'll see is: it doesn't have enough new features . That kind of thinking is one of the reasons that refinement doesn't take place as often as you and I would like.
I think from one perspective advertising refinement is perceived as perpetual incompetence with respect to your capability to deliver a quality product. Horrible inversion of logic.
He's doing too much with too many different things. The following phrase is valid here: "A man with two watches never knows what time it is". I rarely get problems of that magnitude. The only unreliable thing I have is my ADSL connection and that's not a problem as I can use my phone as a backup.
I went from struggling to read a few pages of a book or write some code every evening to currently working on postgrad eduction, other certifications, volunteering, etc. It's not as literally simple a transition (lots of changes in motivation and practices in the mix), but every single device comes with a level of cost in terms of time and cognitive "energy". Stack them all up and it turns into a pretty big percentage of your capacity each day.
Your amazing, multi million lines of code Windows desktop, the work of some 1000 people or more, has a problem with indexing.
The protocol and apps that connect you via email to everyone you want, free, globally and instantly, sometimes loses a mail. Or the UI is slow to load your new messages.
A program with which you can do on your laptop what it took huge teams, million dollars of equipment, and professional expertise to do (FCP), has a crashing bug in some particular action.
The program that lets you talk to everybody on the planet, instantly, with video, and paying nothing, has a badly designed UI.
etc...
Yes, I can see how "everything is broken".
Because, when we didn't have any of these, when 30 years before you had a rotating dial to dial numbers on your phone that only called landlines and cost mega bucks to call internationally, when you had MS-DOS as the most prevalent desktop OS, when 20MB was a huge disk in a desktop system, and before something like video chat was only possible in huge organizations with special software, everything was perfect...
Wanting to improve things? Fine.
Not understanding the complexity and magnitude of the technical achievements you use everyday? Bad.
I've been thinking for some years now, I wish everyone would stop implementing features and perfect the ones that are already there. Optimise. Improve. This is why I was so upset at Sparrow throwing in the towel - they concentrated on one thing, email, and did it better than I'd seen it done before. By specialising they were able to spend the time to get it right.
I know "make something small but better" is a nice motto, but will it work for Apple, Microsoft? Heck, even for a proven startup's product, is it a good long term strategy, or a long term gamble?
There aren't much examples of 37Signal's model of "don't implement features but keep polishing" approach.
So, your amazing feat of engineering phone, with a color retina display, audio-video capabillity, 700.000 apps, gyroscope, HD cameras, etc has some extra stuff taking 3GB drive space (of the 16GB device). Your amazing, multi million lines of code Windows desktop, the work of some 1000 people or more, has a problem with indexing. The protocol and apps that connect you via email to everyone you want, free, globally and…
Examples:
My desktop environment on my laptop is Linux with, 99% of the time, just a bunch of xterms and a browser (without extensions... they tend to crash browsers).
I installed exactly 4 Android apps on my phone (after flashing it to cyanogenmod to get rid of the bloatware): gmaps, youtube, barecode scanner app, some app to write notes on the home screen (NotesWidget). Everything else sucks and is a waste of my time. But even the dead-simple NotesWidget app author managed to mess it up with enough bugs that I am considering writing my own(!) I have tried at least a dozen other notes-taking application and am not satisfied with any of them.
I don't maintain a music library. Sync'ing music across multiple PCs, phones, other devices, etc, suck. Personal libraries "in the cloud" don't work because I am not always online. I just listen to satellite radio in my car.
I own no TV, no game console, no tablet.
And yet, I am a tech enthusiast. I accept a little "complexity" where it makes me happy: I program GPUs/FPGAs, I have a home theater set-up at home, I maintain my own website/blog on colocated servers, etc.
If consumer software companies were working more like, say, people working on Curiosity (Mars' robot) or aircraft navigation software, you could have a phone that does much less but without bugs.
The reason why it is this way is because people usually prefer to cope with minor bugs that giving up on features. Plus, when you buy a product, you usually know the list of features but not the list of potential bugs.
So you can make a company that sells phones with 0 bugs, with a 2004 set of features. Or an OS that focuses purely on providing a bug-free experience, but 5 years late.
Not sure all that would sell well.
Sync software usually takes a conservative approach to deleting or merging records, and leaves duplicates lying around rather than risking deletion of vital user data. This is a good thing. What's bad is that the tools for housekeeping -- merging and deleting duplicates -- are generally rubbish. (I have the same problem with my phone's address book: masses of duplicates due to sync processes that conserve stuff. And trying to get rid of them using the tools provided turns out to be a tedious pain in the neck, requiring multiple mouse-clicks or focus changes per record.)
Further down the list we get into identity management issues. Nobody seems to have a really good handle on how we manage identity across multiple machines, much less how we manage esoteric stuff like family relations for delegating access to photos or music purchases or whatever.