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."

Comments

GOOGLE WENT TO COLLEGE?!

[MondoMor]

No wonder it's so damn smart!

Has it got a Master's? Or should we call it Doctor Google?

Re:GOOGLE WENT TO COLLEGE?!

[M. Baranczak]

And who was "chiming in"? The friend or Wozniak? Seriously, it's been a while since I've seen so much mangled syntax crammed into such a small space. Do I win a necklace if I can figure out what the hell this person's trying to say?

Gone

[darrint]

I get the worst, worst software almost always from Apple.

But I'm not bitter.

Re:Gone

[daviddennis]

But he refuses to give examples, which is strange.

I can tell you that in my experience, the best software by far comes from Apple, from OSX on down to products like Final Cut Pro and Motion. Compare the user interface of Motion with the mess that is Flash and you'll get the point. Or compare Final Cut with Premiere.

Apple's not perfect, and I think Woz is responding to that fact. He's frustrated that even with world-class perfectionist Steve at the helm, software isn't perfect.

And of course this is true. But at least Steve's fighting for perfection - I fundementally agree with the cartoon I linked to - in an industry where most want to settle for "good enough for Government work."

D

Re:Gone

[Golias]

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.

Re:Gone

[tpgp]

From Woz's website

Q: Do you own any Apple stock?

WOZ: I do own Apple stock and I do believe in the company and I'll never desert it. If I had to use Windows, I'd switch to WebTV or retire forever from using computers.

The guy mainly uses Macs - most of his software is going to come from Apple, so of course thats where his bad (and good) experiences are going to come from.

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.

Re:Gone

[Phat_Tony]

The Steve (as opposed to The Woz) does fight for perfection, but he also fights hard for rapid development, early deployment, and lots and lots of features. He doesn't appear to fight at all for a consistent user interface experience, as evidenced by the OSX Finder. He lets them change things back and forth and up and down and left and right all the time, and ignore any sort of plan for consistency, including Apple's own user interface guidelines. Let's put the "find" function in Sherlock! Let's put everything in Sherlock! Let's revise the appearance and API's for Sherlock (by stealing Watson) so the 1,000 existing plugins don't work anymore! Let's take find back out of Sherlock! Let's abandon Sherlock! Let's remake Sherlock (by stealing Konfabulator) and call it Dashboard! Let's replace "Find" with Spotlight! Even though it's just a new search technology, let's change everything about the search interface in Find! It's not better, but it's New New NEW! Different Different DIFFERENT! Yeah!

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.

Re:Gone

[sammy baby]

Let's remake Sherlock (by stealing Konfabulator) and call it Dashboard! Let's replace "Find" with Spotlight! Even though it's just a new search technology, let's change everything about the search interface in Find! It's not better, but it's New New NEW! Different Different DIFFERENT! Yeah!

I wouldn't be so quick to label Dashboard as a Konfabulator rip-off. At best, you could argue that Konfabulator caused someone at Apple to say, "Hey, remember those widgets we used to develop in NeXTstep? See where these guys have taken the idea? Why did we ever get away from this?"

(Answer: because tons of widgets on the desktop were a huge pain in the butt, and it took a virtual container for them - the Dashboard - to make them non-irritating again.)

But generally I think you hit the nail on the head, and damn are you ever right about Spotlight. From the Ars Technica review of Tiger (note that when he references Finder, he's referring to Spotlight-specific behavior) :

Here's some video of the Finder doing what it does best: confounding user expectations and absolutely hosing any semblance of consistency and statefulness. The movie shows the smart folder from the earlier video... being opened and closed in both metal and non-metal modes. While watching, just try and guess how the window will look when it's re-opened after each of the demonstrated actions. You may need to step through the movie slowly to get a full grasp of the insanity.

[movie here]

Under what set of circumstances does this get to ship? I would love to see the "design document" for Spotlight's integration into the Finder's interface, if such a thing even exists. (I highly doubt that it does.) I'm tempted to say this is par for the course when it comes to Finder windows in Mac OS X. But really, this is way beyond the Finder's standard level of user abuse.

Creating a decent interface to the (really quite powerful) techology behind Spotlight could fuel a budding young shareware developer's career, if it weren't for the fact that you just know Apple is likely to change the whole thing again with 10.5.

Re:Gone

[iabervon]

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.

Re:Gone

[javaxman]

The Steve (as opposed to The Woz) does fight for perfection, but he also fights hard for rapid development, early deployment, and lots and lots of features.

That's extremely insightful, you don't work with the man, do you ?

My recollection of briefly working for Steve involves a meeting with a group of 8 engineers where he pretty well had everyone convinced that they could, in a few months' time, fully test an entire OS and extensive application suite, on new hardware, while writing a couple of never-before-imagined applications. In short, we were all going to pull off some miracles, pretty much because of a Steve pep talk. It's great to have inspired engineers, and sometimes people can pull of miracles, but that's a scary way to develop products on a schedule and a budget.

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 ?

Re:Gone

[Burz]

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.

who?

[BushCheney08]

Oh, c'mon. Like this "woz" person has any clue how a computer works. I bet Apple wouldn't touch him with a ten-foot pole...

Troll?

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

I get the worst, worst software almost always from Apple.

This Woz guy is obviously a MS$ fanboy troll! ;-)

Re:Who cares? Should I?

[finkployd]

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

Obvious?

[Red Flayer]

"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. "

It's a symptom of two things, from the standpoint of poor quality software produced by people who are capable of much better:

1) Nothing personal at stake for the people actually producing the software. It's a lot different when your livelihood directly and visibly depends on the quality of the product your employer produces. Whether it's because it's my own company, or I get fat stock options, I'll work harder when I'm trying to reach the cheese.

2) Diluted responsibility for the product. 2,000 people working on a product means that in all likelihood, my individual contreibution will go unnoticed, and therefore I have less incentive to perform well. Also, even if my contribution is perfect, it won't have that much effect on a huge project.

Re:Obvious?

[ucblockhead]

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.

Woz is from a different era

[ACK!!]

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?

That's why I like "Classic" Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

My view has always been: don't let developers (including me) use the latest & greatest technology. Force the build once a week to be run on an "old" PIII @ 800 Mhz w. 128MB RAM. If it's un-usable for quick testing, then go back and fix it.
(by the way, I know I'm being generous in those specs, I personally test all my software on a dog-slow Pentium II @ 233Mhz w. 64M RAM running various "older" OS versions (Win2000, Linux 2.2!, etc.)

Then, when you roll it out to your users and their running the latest 3GHz, 4GB RAM machine, they are happy.

Linux & GNU seem to be the latest (last five+ years) culprits in the bloatware regime. I remember actually compiling the full kernel on an 8MB machine (yes, it took four hours)...now you can't do in under 32MB
(although I guess that's more GCC bloat than anything)

Things are just too big and bloated now.
Give me an old "Classic" Unix with no X, just command line.
Let me pipe my various home-built tools together to create a final simple working FAST result.

TDz.

Has Woz ever *tried* open source software?

[Blakey Rat]

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.

Re:Has Woz ever *tried* open source software?

[eclectic4]

If your finder crashes once a day, then you should fix it as there is obviously something wrong as that is far from the norm.

"Safari just stole focus from this text field because I had the audacity to load a new tab"

That's the way most of us like it, it's how it's supposed to work. If I open a new tab, it's usually because I want to go somewhere else in the same window. Why would you open a new tab otherwise? I'm not sure if it works (not near my Mac at the moment), but UNselecting "Select new tabs as they are created" in the tabs pref pane might work for you.

"And the GUI for Spotlight is almost comically bad, both in the menu bar and in Finder windows."

I like it. What alternative are there for the average use that finds files, folders, documents, messages in Mail, contacts in Address Book, iCal calendars, meta data (Photoshop files, Word docs, E-mails), System Preferences, applications, and even text "within" those files instantly? Your subjective criticism of the GUI not-withstanding, the tech is great. I love it.

"DVD Player steals focus twice every time you insert a DVD"

Again, most people want to watch the DVD they just put in (unless you are ripping them... ahem). And, if that's the case, then just change the preference in the preference pane to not launch DVD player when you put a DVD in! Done! This seems to be simply a usage issue as it takes 3 clicks to change that, from opening the pref panel to change.

Giants are clumsy...

[Iriel]

...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.

Hardware manufacturers

[pubjames]

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.

Re:More nonsense from slashdot

[gowen]

Well, here's some balance for you : The Guardian on why OpenOffice sucks so badly.

Re:Back in the day

[waterlogged]

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.

Re:Back in the day

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Because he designed that excellent keyboard, and composed music in his free time.

I refuse to let you make fun of such a multitalented individual.

Re:Worst, Worst Software from Apple?

[Bobartig]

Wow, that site has some amazing comments.

Userfriendliness

Apple has always had userfriendliness as a high priority with their previous operating systems. With OS X this changed. By basing it on a UNIX-system Apple lost all of their simplicity. Not that OS 9 was great in anyway but atleast you didn't have to mess around with a text based terminal to get things working.

In fact many applications available don't come with a graphical user interface, so if you want them to work, you better start making friends with the terminal.

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.

Re:Back in the day

[NullProg]

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 //gs was the first computer to include a Large Scale Integration (LSI) chip, designed by Steve Wozniak, and called the IWM (Integrated Woz Machine).
http://www.apple-history.com/?page=gallery&model=a IIgs&performa=off&sort=date&order=ASC

2004:
Wheels of Zeus
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1734857,00.as p

He knows more about modern technology than you do.
Enjoy,

Re:I thought this guy was supposed to be cool

[schon]

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?

Re:Indeed

[PantsWearer]

I don't even call it a problem; it's just something you learn to work around. It's like, there was such a cleaner, good approach to it and they did this stupid thing. But remember, the people who wrote the OS X weren't the people who developed the Lisa and Macintosh. Those guys are gone.

If you review the article, this is actually a reference to user centric design, not a reference to anything technical about the underlying operating system. Woz was actually talking about the way the early Mac and Lisa were designed around what the user wanted/expected, not around making the user adjust to the workings of the system.

You might want to remember that user experience is (mostly) independent of technical underpinnings. You can have a crap UI on top of a modern OS (say AIX running only ksh) or a great UI on top of a really crappy OS (pre-X MacOS is a pretty good example).

Re:Evil Progress

[Phat_Tony]

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.