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Woz Says Big Software Doesn't Work
chrizbot writes "A friend of mine studying journalism at Google's alma mater interviewed Steve Wozniak of Apple Computer fame. He chimes in on open source, DRM, record companies and how software from big companies suck so bad (including Apple's!). The part my friend doesn't include is how he guessed a trick was performed and won a necklace from him!" From the article: "Sometimes the engineers are true artists and really care what they're doing, doing a really great job. Although, I don't know how much I can even say that because the big companies, Microsoft, Apple and AOL, they tend to turn out the crappiest products, you know, software-wise. The ones that have the most bugs, the most items that are supposedly in there but don't work. The most things that are left out because they aren't finished. The most things that are inconsistent with the way they did their last program. I get the worst, worst software almost always from Apple."
Well at least he's honest about it. But don't be shocked if a lot of people refuse to purchase anything from your company because of it.
Is he wanting to "jab" Apple into being "better" at what they do due to an underlying love? What are his motives? Does he cite specific reasonings for his rants?
Perhaps there is no ulterior motive and he is just reporting his experience...
Why does everyone have to have motives and such?
Finkployd
You have to understand Woz is from a different era and genre of computing. He has been out of the business since the days when Assembly was king and you had to hack programs and optimize them very, very hard to get them to work at all.
Most folks I know from that era feel the same way about today's large programs whether they are from Apple or not.
Come on, give the old guy a break there was a hell of a lot more to the article than that one quote.
Anyone else RTFA?
ACK
Does he honestly believe that commercial software has more missing features than open source software (in general?) I installed Ubuntu recently, and out of about 4-5 packages I tried to use, I got exactly zero working correctly. Some looked like they worked, but actually didn't. Some just froze when they started up. Some returned obscure error messages I have no clue how to debug (partly because they're written in programmer-ese, but mostly because they're completely undocumented in the manual or the web. Hey, if your program can possibly return error -34525, MAKE SURE YOU DOCUMENT IT!) (*)
I'm sorry, I can't buy any of this crap. Apple and Microsoft might not be kings of software development, but I can tell you that all the software I've downloaded to try on my Mac, EVER (even including the stuff in Fink repositories) worked the first time I ran the software. It may not have done exactly what I wanted, and it may not have had the best GUI in the world, but it worked. That's far more than I can say for the majority of open source software I've tried.
I will say this, though. Apple's QA has gone WAAAY down hill. I'm not even positive they test software at all before shoving it out the door now. Safari just stole focus from this text field because I had the audacity to load a new tab. DVD Player steals focus twice every time you insert a DVD. Finder crashes or freezes at least once a day. And the GUI for Spotlight is almost comically bad, both in the menu bar and in Finder windows. My theory? Those programs are developed mostly by workers at NeXT who didn't have much experience with Classic MacOS. But to have the OS go from zero focus steals (in OS 9.2.2) to stealing focus every goddamned five minutes (OS X), that's just sad. Even Microsoft has gotten to the point where 90% of focus stealing bugs are solved.
(*) Go ahead, call me a moron for not being able to get it to work. I know you want to.
Comment of the year
...but mobs are hard to organize.
Both are generalizations that don't always fit the models that development teams are cast into.
Some software behemoths can make some pretty damn good software or at least have a pretty responsive team for fixing bugs that can (and will always) arise. But some open source software I've worked with has completely alienated me because the organization of it was so abyssmal that nothing ever really got done to crawl out of alpha 0.0.0.halfapercent.9 despite all the phenomenal talent pooled between the developers.
Stereotypes are dangerous so pick your poison, should you decide to follow that route.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
Looking at the other benighted posts on this thread, your one was sadly prescient.
I think some of the very worst software comes from hardware manufacturers. HP printers for instance come with the most appallingly crappy software, a lot of it just badly replicating things that the OS (Windows or Mac) does anyway.
Then I brought a Nikon camera recently, and the stupid software they shipped with it managed to screw up both a Mac and a Windows machine.
Why should I care about Woz and his "opinions"?
/. about what we think is good or what sucks in software. I think we should listen to Woz for pretty close to the same reason I hope the software industry listens to us.
a) Because he's a long-time industry insider who knows what is possible with software.
b) Because he's an end-user and knows what he'd like to see in software.
c) But why Woz and not someone else? Well, we do listen to those other guys too. You, me and a bunch of other people rant on a pretty regulare basis here on
TW
But I'm not bitter.
Woz is no Apple basher. If he's bitching about their software, then he honestly does not like the direction they are taking.
That said, I can't help but wonder if he is looking at the same Apple software as me.
Garage Band 2 is my very life blood. I *love* that app!
X-Code is the bizz-omb.
Pages and Keynote are really neat.
iTunes is the only desktop music player worth getting excited over.
Safari is a pretty good browser.
All I can think is that he must be really, really down on Searchlight and the Dashboard, because those are the only two flubs I can think of to have come out of Cupertino lately... and Searchlight is actually growing on me.
As for the Dashboard... meh. I use it a little, because it's right there, waiting to show me the weather forcast and what-have-you, but I would not exactly weep if it were scrapped in 10.5.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Why have some major software players gone to crap? Because they have to appeal to the lowest common denominator in order to sell in the kind of numbers it takes today to get software published and noticed. That and the fact that Joe wants one software package to do everything
Granted these moves are often made in the guise of software integration but the fact is that the more gizmos you pile on the more issues you're going to have. At one point most geeks were happy about software that did one thing well, now Joe comes in and he wants one package that does everything including wipes.
Look at the hardware market too; HP was a Godsend when they weren't trying to put out 85 different products that did everything. Now we get lousy equipment such as "all in one" devices. Sure, they have more function but the problems are out of hand.
I guess the question is are we ready for mammoth apps and devices that do everything or do we need to cool our heels and get what we have today working right first then tackle the issues of more functions in a tighter package?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
As someone who works at a huge megacorp now, and has worked at small startups in the past, I have to disagree completely. At the big megacorp, those of us that used to be a startup are incredibly unmotivated, it is true, but it has nothing to do with the things you saw. Instead, it is because in a startup you can just make good software while at a huge company, you spend all your time bashing your head against the wall. Working at a big corporation is being forced to use poor quality crap tools because some snake-oil salesman is buddy-buddy with a senior VP 10,000 miles away. Working at a big corporation is working a year on a project only to have it killed just before it enters the testing phase because the original management proponant is on the outs. Working at a big corporation is having 58 different managers all trying to put their "mark" on a product.
I personally am extremely motivated to create quality software. And at a startup, that's what I did. Here...I can't. It isn't my motivation that prevents me. It's the wildly changing requirements, stupid management decisions, inability to make decisions and design by committee.
The root problem is that in a small startup, you generally have one boss, and if that boss isn't already technically knowledgable, you can usually explain things to him. In a huge megacorp, the people making the decisions are usually pretty technically ignorant and are so high up that you have no opportunity to raise issues and so they end up making really stupid decisions.
One thing that I can't emphasise enough: a good developer cannot create good software without good management support. That kind of support is easy to get at startups and very hard to get at huge companies. This is because at a startup, everyone's in the same room and knows each other face to face, whereas at a huge megacorp, management is generally too far removed to have a clue.
Another thing that makes software from huge companies suck: When a company gets truly huge, many people in the chain of command get so caught up in internal power struggles that they lose sight of the customers. Here at the large company I work for, I've seen many good products killed, and other projects set up to fail merely because one upper-management type was trying to get the upper-hand over another. In a small company, everyone's in it together. In a large company, you will always find people who want the other guy to fail in order to better their own position.
The cake is a pie
No kidding...
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
Neither has Dvorak, Jobs, Gates, or Balmer, but that doesn't stop them.
Dvorak (John C. Dvorak) has never done any work in computers -- he's been a journalist his entire life. Frankly, I've never really understood why people paid attention to him. He's been around a long time, but his batting average on predictions is pretty miserable.
Jobs, Gates, and Balmer are all involved in the industry still -- sure, they're in management at this point, but being the top managers of two of the biggest and most influential computer companies in the world means you have relevance.
Woz, while he's done a lot of worthy things since leaving Apple, has not been involved in the industry to any significant extent since. I'd be forced to argue that Dvorak is more relevant than he is, and that's a sad statement. He did some great stuff nearly 30 years ago, but that doesn't mean that he's "with it" now.
Just because he said something negative about apple doesn't mean he hates them - he was almost certainly just being honest.
But of course, knock down someone who even slightly criticises Apple and immediately get modded to +5 by the fanboys.
My pics.
You can tell this guy has "lost touch" when he starts recommending you use OS 9 over OS X; I'm glad those days are over personally, I kind of like being able to fully multitask.
Best. Webhost. Ever. Dreamhost.
Have to agree with the other poster here. iTunes is one of the more frustrating and obnoixious programs I've used. Poor format support, largest memory footprint I've seen, slower than just about everything, and wastes tremendous amounts of the screen. It also does not follow *anyone's* UI conventions. It's the second worst Apple program I've used, only exceeded by the Quicktime player.
The dock in OSX is also very annoying, with the moving around and resizing things on you. It would be nice if there was more of an immediate visual cue to what those little colored buttons in the corner of windows did, too. Yellow and green do not scream big and little to me.
They (specifically Jobs) have also been known to make really poor decisions in hardware user interface, too. That their software UI can be ocassionally obnoxious is not that much of a surprise.
FWIW, I also think skinning is a stupid idea, and ruins the user experience. It leads to terrible UIs and next to no benefit. Toolkit theming is fine, since it's consistent across all your apps.
Don't think I hate Apple entirely, or exclusively, though. One of the worst UI offenders is MS Office, along with such things that I acually want to use, like Trillian. Also, OSX is, overall, one of the most polished OS' out there.
OK so I'll take the bait and feed the troll. Woz has probably forgotten more in the past week than we collectively will learn in the next year about computers and computing. Never underestimate any person that has a root knowledge about how something works. While others may say, "but he hasn't been working with the tools.... or doesn't understand the current state of things...". This doesn't mean the man doesn't understand FAR more about how to get a certain task accomplished. I try not and underestimate, or discount people that don't have the same skill set as me, and you would do well not to either.
I couldn't fail to disagree with you any less.
You'll never get the best software from a company who's business model is to cater to the largest userbase possible. The options they include in a software package will never be the best, merely good enough for the masses and at a price the masses can afford.
It's kinda like expecting the very best food from somewhere like McDonalds. That'll never happen. Instead you have to go to the little corner bestro to get really good food.
In the early days, Apple used to follow their interface guidelines like they were gospel. Now they ignore them in nearly every app they make. No time to start listing all the violations, but for an example, try the minimize and maximize buttons in iTunes. Or try reading their guidelines on when to use brushed metal, and then try to see when they bother to follow their own nearly unintelligible guidelines.
I don't have time to enumerate all of them, but Apple constantly changes how things work for no apparent reason. Key Caps was around since the very early days of the Mac, c. 1986. With OSX, they change the name to Keyboard Viewer. OK, a minor change that makes more sense. Then with 10.3, this handy utility disappears. Did they get rid of it? No! But to find it, you have to dig around in system preferences and activate a special hidden flag-shaped "international" menu, that's always present at the top of your screen, and you can only access it from there.
This is, of course, only one of countless examples.
Apple is missing some user-interface design oversight committee that has the power to review every last change and stop individuals from messing stuff up like this. I shouldn't have to read a Macworld article and dig through the "international" system preferences pane to activate a hidden menu to continue to access a utility that had otherwise been fairly consistent on Macs for 18 years. Again, I'm not just complaining about their one big mistake, there are countless things on par with this.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
I work in tech support with hundreds of mac users going through our helpdesk a week, many of whom are professionals in every imaginable industry. I'd say around 1-3% of them use the terminal regularly, and less than actually have to.
"many applications available don't come with a graphical user interface" which is to say, with Mac OS X, there are lots of terminal based applications already installed and many more available to you. Quite impressive he's trying to spin the robustness of unix as a drawback. I've met some very nice linux developers at my job. I'd say without the combination of friendly GUI and powerful commandline, they probably wouldn't be using a mac to begin with.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
When the 6502 was a hot processor, Woz was a pretty fair hack electrical engineer. Running the video off the CPU was a cute trick. But he hasn't had anything relevant to say about computers in a very long, long time.
Are you trolling?
1986:
The
http://www.apple-history.com/?page=gallery&model=
2004:
Wheels of Zeus
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1734857,00.a
He knows more about modern technology than you do.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
As well, all you 'l33t' web designers should be forced to view your webpages on the aforementioned system using a DIALUP connection. I'd predict a tenfold increase in the speed of loading webpages and reduction of the 'useless' eye-candy.
call it a hunch, I just dont think The Woz see's many Real Poor People at the country club.
Which country club would you be referring to?
Would that be the one where he teaches computing to underprivileged children, and provides them with free laptops?
By 'humanist' he's probably referring to the person-centrered approach, where you put the person in the middle, as it were, and affirm that the person is perfectly ok as they are, and rather than imposing some method or system onto them, you look at what their own desires, needs and preferences are, and work to fit those when designing a machine interface.
However, there was an article recently by some interface guru saying that this approach hasn't really worked with computers, and that at the end of the day, people are naturally able to learn and adapt. We learn to drive cars, we learn to operate washing machines and toaster and all sorts of machines. So rather than worry about making the computer adapt to the human, let the computer be the best tool it can be, and let the human learn and adapt to use it. Don't take the sharp bits off the saw because sharp bits are not friendly to humans--let the saw have sharp bits because it's in the nature of the tool to work that way.
I think the latter approach might be more interesting. We've tried to use the GUI to "intuitively" show the user what to do, but frankly this only worked when you had like a dozen tool icons to pick from. Software now has so many features, so many file formats, so many protocols and stuff, that GUIs are just really complex. So what if there's a button for everything? Most people can't find the buttons because there so many layers to the GUI. People thought it would be easy because you could just "press a button", whereas a lot of the power is in scripting and modeling stuff.
We're stuck with bazillions of Word documents because we wanted to make the computer "natural" like typing a letter. Now with web pages we're desperately trying to get back to some semblance of meaningful and structured content, which unsurprisingly is going to be too complicated to setup for the average Word user.
Perhaps if we'd started by teaching people how to think about and organise information using a computer, we'd be further along today. Computers might cost more, but they might be used in smarter ways?
Committees are poison to software.
The cake is a pie
I would wager he sees usabilty issue, load issues, and has a good idea of what software should be doing that you do not.
The kind of stuff where once pointed it out, seems incredible obvious and will bug you everytime you use the software.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
OR Maybe he's actually used the software and been unhappy with it and is in the fortunate position of being someone to whom people will listen. I've certainly seen enough of problems with Apple software:
1) Itunes leaving several TSR programs running all the time even though I don't have an ipod.
2) Newer copies of itunes won't install for some unknown reason on my system, and both Apple and installshield point the fingers at each other. Apple support has ZERO help to offer to fix the problem.
3) Try to download the latest version of quicktime, and it won't install, because it has itunes bundled, and itunes fails to install
And this is just on a PC. If you look, you can find enough complaints about OSX. There just aren't as many, because not as many people use it as Windows, and those that do are generally loyal beyond the point of fanatacism.
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
Woz doesn't seem to blame Apple for the imperfection (he goes on to say that he still really likes what Apple does); I think his point is that Apple's software is big applications, and they're just too complicated to get perfect. The third-party applications he uses are little things that solve a single problem in a simple way. It's not even that Apple doesn't have little things, but the little things Apple provides have to fit into this whole system, and there's a lot for them not to match, and a lot of similar stuff to sort through. If you install a third-party program, you don't have the same expectations of uniformity, you expect it not to be seamlessly integrated, and you know where you put it.
4) Database-driven file management, with user playlists and auto-synch with MP3 players.
Sorry but iTunes doesn't auto-synch with MP3 players. Unless you bought one from Apple.
Any of the hundreds of other models are completely unsupported (such as the iRiver H320 I've had for a while now).
Or at least that's the way it is on OS X (iBook laptop), I don't know what it's like in Windows. On my Linux desktop I usually use Zinf and "auto-sync" with "cp -Ru".
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Pull your nose out, man. The Foundation does many charitable things, true, and Bill has donated large chunks of cash here and there.
But when you look at his wealth to scale, with *orders of magnitude* more fortune than even necessary to still be fabulously rich, what he does amounts to tossing pennies into the crowd. That's not even considering the PR gained from it. In fact, I would wager that Bill has done more to *hurt* this nation than he has mitigated through charitable donations - sitting on huge amounts of capital, throwing it overseas, extinguishing markets, destroying standards, roadblocking innovation, etc.
I don't hate B.G. I have, though, become very much anti-Microsoft over the years, and every day there's more news about them that shows me I made the right decision in dropping all Microsoft products long ago.
-ZOD-
Hmm... I'm quite sure we can dig things up on MS, too. Actually, their UI shifts are just as frequent as Apple's, but they just never proclaimed to follow one set of UI guidelines.
For instance, Office 2003 has a completely different UI than Office XP, and even that one is different from Office 2K. Visual Studio .NET departed from the norm in UI, if you ever compare it to VS 6. Visio has some rather annoying UI features, too.
Also, the consistency of the UI from OS to OS is unstable. Win2K and WinXP were different enough to cause headaches, and it looks like the trend will continue with Vista. MS also does not enforce UI guidelines, in fact, it makes it very easy to create something that works back-asswords. Witness winamp, as an example.
MS is no angel in this matter, either.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
I'm actually thinking of doing something similar to this for a project I'm working on, so realize that I'm being the Devil's advocate here.
When I was working in IT, I had to administrate a network of Windows machines. Outlook has a user interface which has all kinds of panels that can be dragged around.
Every once in a while, somebody - and it was often me - would do this by accident and find out that a crucial panel was missing from the program, with no clue at all how to get it back. I don't even remember the procedure to get things back, but I do remember it was not all that obvious. So by simple use of the software, someone could customize inadvertently and become completely at sea.
I think geeks as a class wildly overestimate the amount of time people are willing to put into an application. They'll customize it with new wallpaper and the like, but I don't think most people like to really pour energy into the guts of something to make it work better. So I would be cautious about customizability; make sure the vanilla version is perfectly usable as it is, and that people don't have to customize in order to make use of the application.
D
You have entirely missed the point. New features are fine. Useful new features are great. Randomly rearranging existing features is just annoying. Putting common features in different places in different applications is annoying. Having the same widgets unexpectedly do different things in different scenarios (or even in the same scenario) for no reason is annoying. Woz, many people in this thread, and the linked articles like ARStechnica have commented how great the original Macintosh UI was. It was almost entirely new at the time! We have nothing against new. We have a problem with pointless inconsistency and changes that lower our productivity and force us perform lots of pointless memorization to accomplish our tasks.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
My biggest beef with OS X software ( aside from the Finder, which just needs a *complete* re-write ) is the recent lack of UI consistency. Try this : launch Safari, Mail, and iTunes ( most recent versions, in OS X 10.4 ). Check out the look of the windows... are any of them the same? Not really, they're all slightly different-looking... and iTunes looks like no other OS X app ever !
The difference between brushed metal and standard windows was annoying and unnecessary enough, but what is the rationalization for those three Apple-authored applications having such different looks ? Who needs 4 different styles of window dressing on a single machine? They're making Windows look like the platform with UI consistency, WTF is going on at Apple with these differing looks for different apps ?
Believe it or not I use all those apps regularly and the inconsistency does not bother me all that much but then again I like the complete absence of an every-body-must-be-the-same, 'lemming mentality' this inconsistency brings with it. For all it's faults the OS.X graphical UI is still infinitely superior to Windows which it self is full of suboptimally implemented applications (Try looking at some of the sytem Administrative tools that ship with Windows 2003 Server just for example. I partickularly hate the 'IIS Manager' and the 'Computer Management' tools). The example on arstechnica where they cycled between the different looks for Finder was nice, they did have a point and it left me thoroughly confused when I tried it. However, how many users out there are flipping between Finder looks every 2 seconds? Or, more realistically, every two or three days? Pick a look and stick with it, having a choice is not necessarily a failing. I will however agree with the fact that Finder needs a rewrite simply because it has ergonimics shortcomings in all of its incarnations.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
It seems like Apple designers have crossed a threshold in their thinking. They follow a pattern of consistency that more closely resembles the Web now, where different sites each have their own look, but all the little widgets work the same 90% of the time. If this is true, its very smart because they're following the tastes and expectations of their target audience.
Consider also that Apple always wanted icons to have unique color-schemes and shapes to make them instantly identifiable. But now people can more quickly discern an application by variations in window style... and that certainly works in favor of Expose.
That's not to say they haven't transgressed against consistency more than they should. All the old criticisms are still valid; just certain ones are much less important now.
Cool, it might be good then. After all, the first thing I do with any Windows OS is turn off the "looks great" by selecting the Windows Classic skin. All that crap just slows down the interface, and moves important things to new places.
Of course, everything important to system configuration will be moved to a new and arbitrary place with every Windows release, but at least I can keep the UI sane.
I don't get it, to be honest - to me, the UI is a tool, not a game, and I don't want it to look cute and different every year. If I want a game, I have those, after all.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's also worth pointing out that nobody was using it to distribute music at the time, and also that MPEG-4 is the Quicktime container format. While that 'A' might not stand for Apple, it comes very close. The world was using MPEG-1 layer 3, Windows Media, Ogg Vorbis, and RealAudio, in decreasing order of popularity. Out of the five formats I mentioned, only two are actually realiably distributed without DRM.
If we want open formats, we can't be saying that we want open formats unless (insert company of the day) is doing it, and then DRM is okay.