There’s a lot of snippets in there from across the Apple blogsphere with observations that Apple’s software quality is declining.
Note that I myself have involved in some manner from as far back when Apple had a customer facing program known as CQF (Customer Quality Feedback) where both prototype hardware and software beta’s were seeded to “customers” (in quotes since certain products were seeded to only select accounts/businesses especially when it came to hardware prototypes). When Jobs returned and the various avenues of leaks were cutoff (as secrecy became an important tool used to give Apple’s announcements, pop), the CQF program transitioned into the current ongoing AppleSeed program (software only though).
I’m not going to beat around the bush and just cut to the chase. Yes, the quality of the software has seen a marked decline over the years (more so over the last 3 years). Note that every seed that goes GM, has shipped with outstanding issues (though usually those were very minor). That’s not what I’m personally referring to when it comes to the quality decline I’m seeing; what I mean is software features that are so buggy, that they don’t work as advertised.
The timeframe when Apple began to “lose” me though (as far as the detailed level of feedback goes) began during the Lion (10.7) seed. Prior to that, I was mainly involved on the enterprise side with Mac OS X Server and Apple Remote Desktop (just to name a few). Besides the usual testing of the actual system, a lot of my key focal point (especially in the area of usability) was on the two main administration apps; Server Admin and Workgroup Manager. And a lot of that dated all the way back to OS X Server 10.1
The user interface of Server Admin went through a lot of iteration with each beta seed (and had to be forcibly shaped by extensive testing and feedback during that cycle). Apple software engineers would usually re-design the UI taking cues from some of the consumer facing apps (one of the biggest being iTunes once its “sidebar” became its distinguishing feature). Even then, I often times was not satisfied with what finally shipped (features not implemented and/or outstanding/ongoing issues). But each release for each subsequent OS X Server release got better and culminated in the Server Admin that shipped with Snow Leopard Server (10.6).
Even back then though, there was this tendency to release what I term, half-backed features and applications to go along with it. This included stuff like QuickTime Streaming Server (and it’s associated app, QuickTime Broadcaster, that was the epitome of half-assed software development and follow up iteration). When podcasting became the “in” thing, Podcast Server and the associated Podcast Producer and Podcast Capture apps were created while some of their previously touted features in prior releases, remained in this half-baked state.
I touched on these when I wrote “Apple and the Pro market“, “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” (when talking about my travails in an OS X Server upgrade) and the “stupification of OS X Server” back in 2011. Much of what I posted back then, is why I took a different approach from that point forward because from back then, it was already clear that product marketing was having an even bigger hand in fluff features as well product rollout time frames (which often times is contrary to what the actual engineers want to accomplish in terms of smashing out bugs, or god forbid, actually implementing that nifty enhancement request). It’s more about meeting all those key milestones and deadlines, thus requiring prioritizing issues (and thus doesn’t leave much time for anything else).
With Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) Server though, it became clear that all of that previous work, was being depreciated. And sure enough as Apple began this cycle of annual releases with Lion, the key administration software became the new Server app (which lacked a lot of the detailed functionality of the prior suite of applications). The key take away though in some of my prior postings is the tendency that Apple product marketing (for some software lines) had for jumping on certain trends. Software engineers then had to develop software, but also did not seem to have all the necessary resources (which time was probably the biggest one) to really fully develop and iterate on those ideas (resulting in the often times half-baked functionality).
The annual release cycle hasn’t done anything to improve that; it’s probably just made it worse. It’s not like throwing more engineering resources will fix it either (that old adage of “too much cooks in the kitchen spoiling the soup” applies) as part of the magic is how Apple prefers smaller development teams (and ones that are now more functionally collaborative). This is a fine balance to walk since you don’t want to end up with the IBM and Microsoft types of problems where the groups grow so big, that you end up having to deal with slower overall inertia.
This basically translates to living at the edge where software engineers cannot fix all of the small issues quickly enough (because the higher priority show stopping ones, have to take precedent). I’m not even including iCloud or Apple TV in this. I already had my beefs with Apple TV before the Apple TV OS update that gave it the iOS 7 treatment (I never wrote about that in detail except to state that this user interface, does nothing to solve the issues inherent in other poorly designed set top UI’s). And as for iCloud, I’ve made it clear in numerous postings about my distrust of Apple web services; the decline of Apple’s software quality is one main reason I’m not even at the starting phase of having my key data reside in Apple’s cloud.
And that’s a big issue for Apple when it comes to long time Apple users like myself. The key stickiness of the Apple ecosystem relies on getting its customers to fully buy into using and relying on iCloud. Myself, I’m far from that point. I trust Dropbox and Microsoft’s cloud services, far more than I do Apple’s. And if I didn’t have my own personal issues with Google, they too would be a no-brainer.
As noted, I haven’t adopted Yosemite. My test systems have all been reverted to Mavericks (and in the case of my MacBook Pro, all the way back to Snow Leopard). My issues again with Yosemite relate to usability as it relates to the ease of readability. At this juncture, I don’t want to deal with using various 3rd party utilities to change the look (changing the Dock, changing the system font, changing icons, etc). And I’m not the only one who feels this way. This isn’t about not being able to deal with change; it’s about real usability issues that makes Yosemite less of a comfortable and productive environment to work in (both of these are very personal and varies depending on individual uses).
So does any of this have an impact wearing my shareholder hat? Not just yet. Apple’s a huge ship now. It takes time for certain things to have any sort of ranging impact. But as a long term investor, these are the sort of things I look at (including taking a devils advocate approach). And while there are these kind of issues, it hasn’t yet reached something that I would call a systemic one just yet. One thing is clear though, when you have long time Apple pundits like John Gruber also being more than subtle about the slipping quality due to the breakneck pace, someone in a key leadership position at Apple needs to begin taking note and getting a handle on it now before it does become systemic. That’s what led to the previous giants, falling as far as they did because they could not see over their own arrogance and hubris until it was too late. Apple isn’t immune to this.
