If Apple becomes a company where the focus is on making money and protecting the existing success, then it will have fundamentally changed.
Some people will leave Apple, hopefully to start some radical new things.
I don't think Microsoft or Oracle have a different culture, focussing on defending existing success more than forging ahead into new realms. Microsoft and Oracle are the ControlData, DEC and SGI of our age.
I think MS was already long on the wrong path before Gates left. It has essentially become a defensive company, fighting to keep it's Office and Windows relevant.
The power of Jobs was and is, that he's willing to gamble big on the new and unexplored, even if that would jeopardize his existing business.
The second thing is that MS has for a long time seen the OEMs, telco's, corporate IT staff and their ilk as it's customers, not the users. Apple under Jobs has always put the users at the center of everything.
Jobs' philosophy is to make "insanely great" products and then hope people will bring you their money. His goal isn't the money making itself, unlike most other CEOs.
Microsoft never worked that way. They mostly built their empire on luck and anti-competitive behaviour. They are now mostly a company defending their old success and trying to ride it out as long as possible. Once Office and Windows become irrelevant, so will Microsoft.
What I've learned from both IBM and Apple, is that with the right leadership and culture you can survive the demise of your past success, because you don't let it define you, but are instead defined by innovation itself.
I don't think the Woz would have gotten anywhere without Jobs. He's a brilliant engineer, but never a business leader.
I think the key to Jobs' strategy, and Apple's success is that they are entirely focussed on the customer. There was a very interesting article on Forbes.com about the why Apple Stores work and everyone has such a hard time imitating them. It centred around the argument that what Apple does at the core is "to delight their customers". "Making money is the result of the firm's actions, not not goal". That's what the article argues, and has proof in the sense that for example Apple Store employees don't have sales quota, or get commission. They're instructed to advice the customer as best as they can, not shove Apple products down their throat.
I think this is true for Apple design as well: A total focus on the customer. Where a lot of competing companies see their shareholders, OEMs, telecom operators, corporate IT departments and their ilk as the primary customer, Apple, because of it's vertical integration, can focus completely on us.
The only problem that Apple has, is that when it makes the things that the customers really want, it sometimes ends up being out of reach of a lot of people financially. But that's a risk when your focus isn't on the money first.
I think the real danger of Apple going foreward, is what happened after Jobs left the first time, and an error that a lot of existing and past companies made: To protect your existing success at the cost of innovation. One of the things that made Jobs great, is that he wasn't content to ride out his existing success but realised that in today's world any success is fleeting, and you need to keep reinventing yourself though innovation. To many managers today look at minimizing costs, instead of maximizing opportunities.
Apple needs to keep it's absolute focus on the users and continue innovating. If Jobs has been able to ingrain that into the culture of the business, then I think the future for Apple will be bright and they will give us many more wondrous gadgets to look forward to.
I don't think you're right. I think it's a very real effect that most hardware and software companies only cater to the top1-3 players in the market. For Desktop OSses that's Windows, even OSX is lagging far behind in available software and hardware with Linux a distant third. On the smartphone iOS is number one, with Android being nearly supported as well and Windows and Symbian tied for a distant third place.
It's the law of diminishing returns for hardware and software developers. At some point it's not worth supporting anything but the top 1-3 as the cost outweighs the gains. It's why most things only support Windows.
The other major force is the users. They tend to aggregate to the dominant player, as to them easy exchangeability and compatibility and available support are important.
If Apple was as dominant in the tablet market, as Microsoft is in the desktop market, then even giving the Touchpad away for free would only have given HP a reaction at the level Linux enjoys.
Microsoft of course got where it is in the desktop market though all kinds of monopolistic and anti-competitive actions. I haven't seen Apple or Google really do anything like that. What I see is fair and open competition. Apple isn't asking operators not so sell Android phones next to their iPhones and Google isn't blocking access to gmail for iPhones. That would be anti-competitive behaviour.
Instead they compete on price and quality.
Apple started from scratch in 2007, Google in 2009, I'm amazed how they obliterated established players like Microsoft and Nokia in such little time. I'm sure another new player could as well if they could do something that would be far ahead of Apple's and Google's offerings.
I think part of the problem is that Apple has an even larger headstart on tablets than they had on smartphones.
Why? I think that the introduction of the iPhone shook the phone industry to it's core and largely took them by surprise. I don't think that the Nokias and Motorolas of this world really would have thought that a PC/laptop maker like Apple would have been a serious competitor, especially after the ROKR, if you had asked them before the 9th of January 2007. After that date all phone manufactures all of a sudden were scrambling to make something similar as they realised that Apple didn't just make a phone like they did, which they could compete against like they were used to. Apple was miles ahead and they were scrambling desperately to catch up as Apple had just eaten their lunch and was after their dinner as well.
There was an article linked from Slashdot a couple of weeks ago. It's called "Apples Retail Stores more than Magic" and explains one of the reasons why the others have such a hard time emulating Apples success. I found it very enlightening.
To quote the article: "Most firms see themselves in business to make money. That’s “the bottom line”—the primary goal of management. By contrast, Apple’s goal is to delight its customers. Apple has grasped that making money is the result of the firm’s actions, not the goal."
It's a very interesting read, if you want to understand part of the success of Apple and why it has such a loyal customer base.
I'm not so sure, I think $200,000 per classroom isn't such an unreasonable amount.
The teacher's average salary is about $50,000. Add to that health care coverage, pensions, and the employer administration and I think you're around $100,000. Now there's heating, electricity, water, cleaning, maybe some form of internet/network & It staff, someone administering the pupils, classroom schedules, maintaining the grounds and building, teaching materials, maybe some software licences, replacing and maintaining furniture and what have you.
I can see that adding up to somewhere in the $200,000 range quite easily. Some will be below that, but as a national average I think it's at least in the right ball park.
You'll need something to sync your phone, Apple has iTunes, Microsoft has ActiveSync, Nokia has the Nokia PC suite, Android has ?.
I don't know what the default sync application for Android is, and I can't find it with a simple search.
I don't think iTunes is the real problem, each mobile device platform needs an application to sync. Stuff like the Stock application are things that are more annoying.
Yeah. Although I think you should be able to uninstall stuff like the Stocks thing.
It's fine that they have some demo applications on there to show of what the phone can do, especially from the start before all these apps existed, but I would like to be able to remove them. It's not crapware in the sense that it gets in your way, but whatever you do, it's still useless clutter somewhere.
Yes, it's a funny thing. Marketing is the core function of iOS.
In a sense it's the core function of Apple. I recently read this interesting article called "Apple's Retail Success Is More Than Magic" on Forbes.com. It explains that Apple focusses on making customers happy first, and only making a profit second. From the article:
"Apple has grasped that making money is the result of the firm’s actions, not the goal."
"According to several employees and training manuals, sales associates are taught an unusual sales philosophy: not to sell, but rather to help customers solve problems. “Your job is to understand all of your customers’ needs—some of which they may not even realize they have,” one training manual says. To that end, employees receive no sales commissions and have no sales quotas."
I found it a very enlightening insight into why Apple is so successful and has such a loyal following.
As far as I know you can easily remove them on OSX and use alternatives.
On iOS it's harder, and there are no alternatives unless you jailbreak the device, except Opera is available. But then you could argue that having your repository and sync application be OS specific isn't so weird, and in case of iPod/iPhone central to what Apple is trying to do.
You don't install SuSE or RedHat and then complain that they use rpms, or Windows and complain that they use.msi or you have to use ActiveSync to connect to Windows Mobile devices.
By the way, what is the standard sync application for Android phones? I honestly don't know and a simple search couldn't tell me.
It's much older. The Catolic vulgate and it's interpretation already were a problem for people like Galileo.
But I don't see why these evangelical scientists have a problem with not taking everything in the Bible literally. The evangelicals I know have been taught from a young age that the Bible is the Truth and any scientific evidence that contradicts it, is manufactured by God to tempt the faithful.
Now a stance like that might make it hard to be taken serious in certain scientific lines of work, but then I just think these fundamentalist Christians should not choose such lines of work or just assume that mutation rates between Adam&Eve up to a while after Noah were much higher because God wanted it that way.
Their statement seems to mean that they even believe in Evolution. I thought that was a no no for any good fundamentalist Christian?
I still find it odd that the USA has a culture that's so much more violent than any other western country I know.
If someone tried to station police officers at any school in my country, they would be laughed at. I think that would be true nearly everywhere in Europe.
Can someone explain to me, why the USA is so violent?
I think you describe most Apple applications. Drag the.app to where you want to have it: It's installed. Drap the.app to the dustbin: It's uninstalled.
Sure the.app is actually a directory, but not the single file it looks to be, unless you "show content", but that's hidden from everyone but the most expert users. To the normal user base, the application is just a single File icon they can drag around and put where they please.
One of the problems with US politics is that Socialist is a bad word. This means the word liberal gets used a lot for things which aren't. Most socialists are actually very conservative. In a lot of countries it's the more capitalistic parties that are also the more liberal ones. It's just in US politics that the word has been hijacked. Blame McCarthyism.
I think the point of the article is that when those challenges came, IBM was ready to answer them and apparently nobody else was. They could have just kept making cheese slicers, but IBM had a vision to be on the edge of what is technologically possible.
I think the problem is that software developers aren't organized.
I don't just mean something like a labour union. It could also be like the medics, civil engineers and lawyers, with widely regarded exams.
We let ourselves be treated like this.
I think it's because of three reasons: 1) Unlike medics and civil engineers, there usually is no responsibility for failure. 2) Software developers as a whole aren't the most social. 3) Software engineers usually don't have money as their prime motivation.
Meh. Microsoft's strategy has always been to claim that the next version will solve all problems, just wait for it and see, Many times they have touted the mythological next version to have all kinds of great improvements.
But far too often have they failed to deliver on their promises. Everything from Chicago (Windows 95) onward has been over promising and under delivering.
Microsoft has a problem delivering on it's promises. Apple never promises anything, but it often actually delivers. And not just stuff that's usable but awkward, but well designed and easy to use.
I have stopped believing Microsoft's promises somewhere around 2000, when I made the stupid mistake of buying a PocketPC 2000 device.
I can wait for MS to deliver the next big thing, but somehow it's always just over the horizon, or I can use Apple today.
With Microsoft I have the same feeling as with Nuclear Fusion. Being able to actually use it, always seems to be just over the hoziron, just wait for the next version.
I think the GUI in general has been a huge improvement, because before it, you could only do something if you knew the right command/shortcut by heart, or had stuff like the template above. Now you can search the menus until you find what you need.
The problem is that people don't know how much a computer can help them, so don't go searching for this functionality. Or they might now Search in Word, but never thought it might work in a browser too.
The lack of choice also runs through the character classes and the balancing. I always felt that Blizzard made a huge mistake in tying PvE and PvP balance together - they should have switched the game to different rules entirely whenever PvP was invoked. As it is, because of the constant tweaks required to maintain PvP balance, Blizzard got into the habit of constantly tinkering with every class in the game - and then fundamentally redesigning classes largely just because they felt like it.
There's no freedom in WoW to develop your class in ways that Blizzard hadn't anticipated. They know how they want you to play a class and if you don't go along with their scheme, they'll just patch it so that you have no choice.
I agree with this. The game has become a lot more cookie-cutter and railroading over the years. I wish you could still talk about Moonkin tanks, or Hybrid builds. I think linking PvP balance to PvE, took a lot of the fun from PvE.
I have some other things to add: 1) I've just recently come back to the game. The thing that made Blizzard great was their level of support for their games. It took me an entire evening to get my addons in a somewhat functioning state again. Sure there's Curse and their client that fills part of that hole, but I feel like Blizzard dropped the ball in a big way there. There should be one central location for all addons, preferably so they are browsable and installable from in the game, and your settings are saved online so you can move easily between multiple computers. 2) UI design. It was pretty good for when it started, and the addons helped. But they should have done more, much more, to improve it. Especially the healing interfaces are still very bad. 3) Solo vs. group play. The game needs different roles to support it's group play: tanks, healers, ranged and melee dps. But these are nowhere nearly equally effective for the solo play, which is also an important part of the game. Sure Dual spec has helped, but I still see it as a fundamental design flaw.
Slashdot Mirror
If Apple becomes a company where the focus is on making money and protecting the existing success, then it will have fundamentally changed.
Some people will leave Apple, hopefully to start some radical new things.
I don't think Microsoft or Oracle have a different culture, focussing on defending existing success more than forging ahead into new realms. Microsoft and Oracle are the ControlData, DEC and SGI of our age.
I think MS was already long on the wrong path before Gates left. It has essentially become a defensive company, fighting to keep it's Office and Windows relevant.
The power of Jobs was and is, that he's willing to gamble big on the new and unexplored, even if that would jeopardize his existing business.
The second thing is that MS has for a long time seen the OEMs, telco's, corporate IT staff and their ilk as it's customers, not the users. Apple under Jobs has always put the users at the center of everything.
Jobs' philosophy is to make "insanely great" products and then hope people will bring you their money. His goal isn't the money making itself, unlike most other CEOs.
Microsoft never worked that way. They mostly built their empire on luck and anti-competitive behaviour. They are now mostly a company defending their old success and trying to ride it out as long as possible. Once Office and Windows become irrelevant, so will Microsoft.
What I've learned from both IBM and Apple, is that with the right leadership and culture you can survive the demise of your past success, because you don't let it define you, but are instead defined by innovation itself.
I don't think the Woz would have gotten anywhere without Jobs. He's a brilliant engineer, but never a business leader.
I think the key to Jobs' strategy, and Apple's success is that they are entirely focussed on the customer. There was a very interesting article on Forbes.com about the why Apple Stores work and everyone has such a hard time imitating them. It centred around the argument that what Apple does at the core is "to delight their customers". "Making money is the result of the firm's actions, not not goal". That's what the article argues, and has proof in the sense that for example Apple Store employees don't have sales quota, or get commission. They're instructed to advice the customer as best as they can, not shove Apple products down their throat.
I think this is true for Apple design as well: A total focus on the customer. Where a lot of competing companies see their shareholders, OEMs, telecom operators, corporate IT departments and their ilk as the primary customer, Apple, because of it's vertical integration, can focus completely on us.
The only problem that Apple has, is that when it makes the things that the customers really want, it sometimes ends up being out of reach of a lot of people financially. But that's a risk when your focus isn't on the money first.
I think the real danger of Apple going foreward, is what happened after Jobs left the first time, and an error that a lot of existing and past companies made: To protect your existing success at the cost of innovation. One of the things that made Jobs great, is that he wasn't content to ride out his existing success but realised that in today's world any success is fleeting, and you need to keep reinventing yourself though innovation. To many managers today look at minimizing costs, instead of maximizing opportunities.
Apple needs to keep it's absolute focus on the users and continue innovating. If Jobs has been able to ingrain that into the culture of the business, then I think the future for Apple will be bright and they will give us many more wondrous gadgets to look forward to.
I don't think you're right. I think it's a very real effect that most hardware and software companies only cater to the top1-3 players in the market. For Desktop OSses that's Windows, even OSX is lagging far behind in available software and hardware with Linux a distant third. On the smartphone iOS is number one, with Android being nearly supported as well and Windows and Symbian tied for a distant third place.
It's the law of diminishing returns for hardware and software developers. At some point it's not worth supporting anything but the top 1-3 as the cost outweighs the gains. It's why most things only support Windows.
The other major force is the users. They tend to aggregate to the dominant player, as to them easy exchangeability and compatibility and available support are important.
If Apple was as dominant in the tablet market, as Microsoft is in the desktop market, then even giving the Touchpad away for free would only have given HP a reaction at the level Linux enjoys.
Microsoft of course got where it is in the desktop market though all kinds of monopolistic and anti-competitive actions. I haven't seen Apple or Google really do anything like that. What I see is fair and open competition. Apple isn't asking operators not so sell Android phones next to their iPhones and Google isn't blocking access to gmail for iPhones. That would be anti-competitive behaviour.
Instead they compete on price and quality.
Apple started from scratch in 2007, Google in 2009, I'm amazed how they obliterated established players like Microsoft and Nokia in such little time. I'm sure another new player could as well if they could do something that would be far ahead of Apple's and Google's offerings.
I think part of the problem is that Apple has an even larger headstart on tablets than they had on smartphones.
Why? I think that the introduction of the iPhone shook the phone industry to it's core and largely took them by surprise. I don't think that the Nokias and Motorolas of this world really would have thought that a PC/laptop maker like Apple would have been a serious competitor, especially after the ROKR, if you had asked them before the 9th of January 2007.
After that date all phone manufactures all of a sudden were scrambling to make something similar as they realised that Apple didn't just make a phone like they did, which they could compete against like they were used to. Apple was miles ahead and they were scrambling desperately to catch up as Apple had just eaten their lunch and was after their dinner as well.
There was an article linked from Slashdot a couple of weeks ago. It's called "Apples Retail Stores more than Magic" and explains one of the reasons why the others have such a hard time emulating Apples success. I found it very enlightening.
To quote the article:
"Most firms see themselves in business to make money. That’s “the bottom line”—the primary goal of management. By contrast, Apple’s goal is to delight its customers. Apple has grasped that making money is the result of the firm’s actions, not the goal."
It's a very interesting read, if you want to understand part of the success of Apple and why it has such a loyal customer base.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/06/17/apples-retail-stores-more-than-magic/
I'm not so sure, I think $200,000 per classroom isn't such an unreasonable amount.
The teacher's average salary is about $50,000. Add to that health care coverage, pensions, and the employer administration and I think you're around $100,000.
Now there's heating, electricity, water, cleaning, maybe some form of internet/network & It staff, someone administering the pupils, classroom schedules, maintaining the grounds and building, teaching materials, maybe some software licences, replacing and maintaining furniture and what have you.
I can see that adding up to somewhere in the $200,000 range quite easily. Some will be below that, but as a national average I think it's at least in the right ball park.
You'll need something to sync your phone, Apple has iTunes, Microsoft has ActiveSync, Nokia has the Nokia PC suite, Android has ?.
I don't know what the default sync application for Android is, and I can't find it with a simple search.
I don't think iTunes is the real problem, each mobile device platform needs an application to sync. Stuff like the Stock application are things that are more annoying.
Yeah. Although I think you should be able to uninstall stuff like the Stocks thing.
It's fine that they have some demo applications on there to show of what the phone can do, especially from the start before all these apps existed, but I would like to be able to remove them. It's not crapware in the sense that it gets in your way, but whatever you do, it's still useless clutter somewhere.
Yes, it's a funny thing. Marketing is the core function of iOS.
In a sense it's the core function of Apple. I recently read this interesting article called "Apple's Retail Success Is More Than Magic" on Forbes.com. It explains that Apple focusses on making customers happy first, and only making a profit second. From the article:
"Apple has grasped that making money is the result of the firm’s actions, not the goal."
"According to several employees and training manuals, sales associates are taught an unusual sales philosophy: not to sell, but rather to help customers solve problems. “Your job is to understand all of your customers’ needs—some of which they may not even realize they have,” one training manual says. To that end, employees receive no sales commissions and have no sales quotas."
I found it a very enlightening insight into why Apple is so successful and has such a loyal following.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/06/17/apples-retail-stores-more-than-magic/
As far as I know you can easily remove them on OSX and use alternatives.
On iOS it's harder, and there are no alternatives unless you jailbreak the device, except Opera is available. But then you could argue that having your repository and sync application be OS specific isn't so weird, and in case of iPod/iPhone central to what Apple is trying to do.
You don't install SuSE or RedHat and then complain that they use rpms, or Windows and complain that they use .msi or you have to use ActiveSync to connect to Windows Mobile devices.
By the way, what is the standard sync application for Android phones? I honestly don't know and a simple search couldn't tell me.
The UI now just looks like a cluttered mess.
And how is this different from the normal GIMP interface?
It's much older. The Catolic vulgate and it's interpretation already were a problem for people like Galileo.
But I don't see why these evangelical scientists have a problem with not taking everything in the Bible literally. The evangelicals I know have been taught from a young age that the Bible is the Truth and any scientific evidence that contradicts it, is manufactured by God to tempt the faithful.
Now a stance like that might make it hard to be taken serious in certain scientific lines of work, but then I just think these fundamentalist Christians should not choose such lines of work or just assume that mutation rates between Adam&Eve up to a while after Noah were much higher because God wanted it that way.
Their statement seems to mean that they even believe in Evolution. I thought that was a no no for any good fundamentalist Christian?
I still find it odd that the USA has a culture that's so much more violent than any other western country I know.
If someone tried to station police officers at any school in my country, they would be laughed at. I think that would be true nearly everywhere in Europe.
Can someone explain to me, why the USA is so violent?
I think you describe most Apple applications. .app to where you want to have it: It's installed. .app to the dustbin: It's uninstalled.
Drag the
Drap the
Sure the .app is actually a directory, but not the single file it looks to be, unless you "show content", but that's hidden from everyone but the most expert users. To the normal user base, the application is just a single File icon they can drag around and put where they please.
OSX is the answer you're looking for.
And of course there's Steam for games. But that's not for freeware
And as others have said, many of the Linux distribution repositories offer a similar system, although almost exclusively for freeware.
What Apple did was allow both freeware and paid-for applications from the same store. And slapped a user friendly UI on it.
I know this is Slashdot, but have you read the article? Maybe you should.
What it really is about is that a lot of companies focus too much on cost cutting and to little on pleasing the customer by innovating.
If managers decide to outsource is merely a side effect of the poor management decisions.
One of the problems with US politics is that Socialist is a bad word. This means the word liberal gets used a lot for things which aren't. Most socialists are actually very conservative. In a lot of countries it's the more capitalistic parties that are also the more liberal ones. It's just in US politics that the word has been hijacked. Blame McCarthyism.
No. It's just a stupid idea compared to services like Spotify.
I think the point of the article is that when those challenges came, IBM was ready to answer them and apparently nobody else was. They could have just kept making cheese slicers, but IBM had a vision to be on the edge of what is technologically possible.
I found the speech itself good to read as well.
The reduction in R&D spending by several companies has me worried. It's nice to see IBM speak out in favour of it.
It's called maintenance. Most people don't understand that software needs maintenance and regular check ups, just like hardware does.
I think the problem is that software developers aren't organized.
I don't just mean something like a labour union. It could also be like the medics, civil engineers and lawyers, with widely regarded exams.
We let ourselves be treated like this.
I think it's because of three reasons:
1) Unlike medics and civil engineers, there usually is no responsibility for failure.
2) Software developers as a whole aren't the most social.
3) Software engineers usually don't have money as their prime motivation.
Meh. Microsoft's strategy has always been to claim that the next version will solve all problems, just wait for it and see, Many times they have touted the mythological next version to have all kinds of great improvements.
But far too often have they failed to deliver on their promises. Everything from Chicago (Windows 95) onward has been over promising and under delivering.
Microsoft has a problem delivering on it's promises. Apple never promises anything, but it often actually delivers. And not just stuff that's usable but awkward, but well designed and easy to use.
I have stopped believing Microsoft's promises somewhere around 2000, when I made the stupid mistake of buying a PocketPC 2000 device.
I can wait for MS to deliver the next big thing, but somehow it's always just over the horizon, or I can use Apple today.
With Microsoft I have the same feeling as with Nuclear Fusion. Being able to actually use it, always seems to be just over the hoziron, just wait for the next version.
Remember the WordPerfect keyboard template:
http://www.mtmonthly.com/runmac/wp51keys.jpg
I think the GUI in general has been a huge improvement, because before it, you could only do something if you knew the right command/shortcut by heart, or had stuff like the template above. Now you can search the menus until you find what you need.
The problem is that people don't know how much a computer can help them, so don't go searching for this functionality. Or they might now Search in Word, but never thought it might work in a browser too.
It's a conceptual problem.
The lack of choice also runs through the character classes and the balancing. I always felt that Blizzard made a huge mistake in tying PvE and PvP balance together - they should have switched the game to different rules entirely whenever PvP was invoked. As it is, because of the constant tweaks required to maintain PvP balance, Blizzard got into the habit of constantly tinkering with every class in the game - and then fundamentally redesigning classes largely just because they felt like it.
There's no freedom in WoW to develop your class in ways that Blizzard hadn't anticipated. They know how they want you to play a class and if you don't go along with their scheme, they'll just patch it so that you have no choice.
I agree with this. The game has become a lot more cookie-cutter and railroading over the years. I wish you could still talk about Moonkin tanks, or Hybrid builds. I think linking PvP balance to PvE, took a lot of the fun from PvE.
I have some other things to add:
1) I've just recently come back to the game. The thing that made Blizzard great was their level of support for their games. It took me an entire evening to get my addons in a somewhat functioning state again. Sure there's Curse and their client that fills part of that hole, but I feel like Blizzard dropped the ball in a big way there. There should be one central location for all addons, preferably so they are browsable and installable from in the game, and your settings are saved online so you can move easily between multiple computers.
2) UI design. It was pretty good for when it started, and the addons helped. But they should have done more, much more, to improve it. Especially the healing interfaces are still very bad.
3) Solo vs. group play. The game needs different roles to support it's group play: tanks, healers, ranged and melee dps. But these are nowhere nearly equally effective for the solo play, which is also an important part of the game. Sure Dual spec has helped, but I still see it as a fundamental design flaw.