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Apple’s declining software quality

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Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#421

Post by mwfunk »

roymurdock wrote: post #380
mwfunk wrote: post #367

I blame the stock market pressure towards growth. The stock market rewards growth at the expense of everything else. It's like a kid pinching his arm to blow up a mosquito that was biting him- it's forced to grow and grow and grow until it pops. It's no longer acceptable to simply run a profitable business with happy employees and customers. It creates a push towards constant acceleration in all things- shorter relea…

Pretty simple solution...if you don't want to be beholden to external shareholders, don't go public. If you're pre IPO, fund your company through debt, which is extremely cheap at the moment with interest rates at historical lows, or sane, sustainable equity rounds through investors who you know and trust and are in it for the long haul. If you're post IPO, pull a Dell and exit the public markets so you can refocus o…

Unfortunately "pulling a Dell" is only feasible years after a company's market cap has completely tanked, and still requires a ton of capital plus no perceived value to anyone outside the company (otherwise someone else would buy it long before the company could buy itself).

The circumstances were ideal for Dell, and even then look at how incredibly long and tortuous that process was. It almost didn't happen, it's almost miraculous that it finally did. Good for them though, I wish it were much easier for companies to go private again.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#423

Post by tosseraccount »

wcummings wrote: post #398
ProAm wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I blame the stock market pressure towards growth This is because almost everyone's retirement fund/401k/IRA is now directly tied to the stock market in one form or another. There are no more pensions, so people need growth in order to retire and live a reasonable life in your last years.

Pensions weren't/aren't invested in the market similarly to 401k's?

Yes. Always were. It's economics literacy that seems to be absent.

The people that are nostalgic for defined benefit pensions never seem to remember the corrupt Teamsters' pension funds. They only remember how their Fidelity 401k did in 2008.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#424

Post by KirinDave »

I think this goes back to Apple's Other Big Problem.

They're getting better at software, distributed systems, etc. But everyone else is getting better faster, and catching up on design.

And you hear how Apple employees are forced to work, using codebooks to talk over lunch and without a lot of cross communication for fear of project leaks and you go, "Oh. That's why they're struggling to keep moving forward."

They're basically buying a lot of their core tech and repackaging it these days to keep velocity. But that too isn't a silver bullet, as it fragments the tech space.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#425

Post by talldan »

The biggest annoyances for me are quite minor, but common occurrences.

Multiple password prompts, having to login twice after a restore, terrible multi-monitor support, lack of window management, unclear system prefs (or things have moved again since the last update), hidden options (holding the option key is so unintuitive) and shortcuts, networking tools are poor, weird update process, notifications blocking the UI of apps, strange finder UI.

There are a lot of UX issues that make it a frustrating experience.

I was a fairly late converter to OS X having used Windows and Linux before. I used to hear people berate Windows similar issues to those above, and I'm surprised on switching to OS X that things aren't all that different/better.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#426

Post by tosseraccount »

tosseraccount wrote: post #195
jpeterson wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. The revisionist hero worship and sanctification of Steve Jobs has reached absurd levels since his death.

The Cult of Steve? It think it's actually declined a little.

[ q.e.d. ... dang, c'mon dude. give it a rest. ]

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#427

Post by nostrademons »

Animats wrote: post #396
sandworm101 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> Apple has total control over the hardware, total control over third party developers, and $203 billion in cash. What are they doing wrong? Nothing. And that is the problem. When you are generally speaking doing everything well there is little room for massive improvement. The days of perpetually exponential improvement, and resulting growth, are over. Apple is not a startup. Like Ford, Sony and GE, they now have…

Apple is losing market share to Android. The gravy train may not go on forever. Apple today is in the position of GM in GM's glory days, the wonderful days of powerful V8 engines, HydraMatic transmissions, tailfins, and the "longer, lower, wider" wide-track Pontiac. GM didn't think they needed massive improvement in quality. They were wrong. Watch this commercial for the 1967 Pontiac GTO.[1] Looks a little like one o…

I think that the Apple/Google/Microsoft/IBM quadrifecta perfectly illustrates one of the lesser-known points of The Innovator's Dilemma: customers care about different values in different points of the product's lifecycle, and that leads to differing companies becoming dominant.

When a new product category is introduced, customers primarily care about ease of use and relevance to their lives. Radical vertical integration is usually necessary to achieve this, because any friction in the product's interface is on top of the friction of getting consumers to use a product that they're completely unfamiliar with. Hence, the market is totally dominated by one company that makes everything from the chips to the hardware to the OS to the apps. This is Apple. This is the Apple II in 1976, the Mac in 1985, the iPhone in 2007, the iPad in 2010, and now the Apple Watch in 2015. (It's also Netscape in 1993, Yahoo in 1998, Amazon in the early 2000s, and AWS today.)

As the market matures, more competitors enter. An ecosystem of third-party apps develops. Hardware supplier prices drop as more hardware manufacturers develop expertise and enter the market. Customers start to value compatibility, options, customizability, and adherence to standards over raw ease of use. This is Google now and was Microsoft in the 80s & 90s. This is MS-DOS in 1981, and Windows 3.1 in 1991, and IE5 in 1999, Google Search in 2000, Chrome in 2008, and Android in 2011-present.

Eventually the technology moves up-market. Customers start to care more about security, stability, reliability, and performance. That's Microsoft now and IBM in the 70s & 80s. That's mainframes in the 80s, and MS Office and Win7 now. At this point, the technology is already being disrupted, but the disruptive technology isn't reliable enough for a segment of the market.

Finally, you get to the point where customers care about brand and compatibility with existing installations. This is maintenance work, where the company becomes a consulting outfit to keep all the technologies they invented a generation ago running. That's IBM now.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#428

Post by [deleted] »

bluedino wrote: post #414
nostrademons wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, I think it's a perception problem. As someone whose starry-eyed Mac obsession predated Windows 95 - Apple's software has always been buggy. It was buggy under Sculley, it was buggy under Amelio, and it was buggy under Jobs. I remember getting plenty of sad Macs under System 6 and 7, and early versions of OS X weren't any better. We just didn't care because Steve Jobs was really good at distracting us with promis…

>> Apple's software has always been buggy. It was buggy under Sculley, it was buggy under Amelio... Classic Mac OS was buggy by design - it didn't have multitasking and memory protection, it was single user... Windows had that same problem before 2000 (well, NT 4, but not many people used that). I use OS X daily and I use Windows 7 daily. I have far fewer issues with OS X for whatever reason that may be. My computers…

[deleted]

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#429

Post by igrekel »

yeukhon wrote: post #328
coldtea wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's just no way in hell Steve Jobs would be putting up with this and I wish he was alive to tear some people a new one. I didn't like Jobs but respect his ability to achieve things. You probably wasn't paying attention when Job was running things. OS X 10.1 was a mess -- it took until several updates to become somewhat usable. The Finder was half-arsed for a decade. Mail.app had several issues. The Windows vers…

> The Windows versions of iTunes was crappy. Oh joy. I remember those days when people were angry because plugging your iPod into a new PC means wiping your library! > That said, I don't buy the "Apple software went downhill as of late" thing. Perception on Mac after people switch from Windows to Mac OSX immediately is awesome. The perception is different if you use Mac OSX for a long time and suddenly you see comput…

My main computer is an OSX both at work and at home. Honestly it isn't very responsive compared to recent lung desktops or even the latest windows 10. Or at least it mostly feels that way when using Eclipse, so maybe its the JVM.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#430

Post by digi_owl »

nostrademons wrote: post #391
Animats wrote: post #372

This has to be a management problem. Apple has total control over the hardware, total control over third party developers, and $203 billion in cash. What are they doing wrong? Apple has the resources to approach software like aerospace. Formal interface specs, heavy Q/A, tough regression tests, formal methods. It's expensive, but Apple ships so many copies that the cost per unit is insignificant. Microsoft did that,…

Nah, I think it's a perception problem. As someone whose starry-eyed Mac obsession predated Windows 95 - Apple's software has always been buggy. It was buggy under Sculley, it was buggy under Amelio, and it was buggy under Jobs. I remember getting plenty of sad Macs under System 6 and 7, and early versions of OS X weren't any better. We just didn't care because Steve Jobs was really good at distracting us with promis…

> Microsoft finally got a handle on security & software quality just as the world ceased to care about them.

Not quite. They got a handle on security when Linux list a fire under their ass.

Competition, true honest to market competition, spurs improvement.

The thing about Apple is that they may have competition on hardware, but they have no competition on Software.

If you buy a Mac or a iPhone, you have already thrown money at Apple. But you can easily assemble a PC without Windows and then install Linux on it.

Keep in mind that the latest US warship is not running Windows, but RHEL. That is a very big wake up call for Microsoft, where before we have seen the likes of Win2k (US ship) and XP (UK submarine) used around the world.

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