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Woz Says Big Software Doesn't Work 483

Posted by Zonk from the memories-nothing-more-than-memories dept.
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."
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Woz Says Big Software Doesn't Work More

Woz Says Big Software Doesn't Work

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  • GOOGLE WENT TO COLLEGE?! (Score:5, Funny)

    by MondoMor ( 262881 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @11:30AM (#14210550) Homepage Journal
    No wonder it's so damn smart!

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

  • Gone (Score:5, Funny)

    by darrint ( 265374 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @11:31AM (#14210558) Homepage

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

    But I'm not bitter.

    • Re:Gone (Score:5, Informative)

      by daviddennis ( 10926 ) <david@amazing.com> on Thursday December 08, 2005 @11:37AM (#14210607) Homepage
      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 [ubersoft.net] 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 (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Phat_Tony ( 661117 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @12:43PM (#14211221)
        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 (Score:4, Interesting)

          by daviddennis ( 10926 ) <david@amazing.com> on Thursday December 08, 2005 @01:16PM (#14211530) Homepage
          My guess is that part of it is thanks to people like me, who on the whole like change. The subset of customers I represent love to buy a new release of the software, because we're getting new and more interesting goodies. For us, it just wouldn't seem right if there wasn't some radical change thrown in with the mix, as long as it doesn't slow us down much.

          In other words, I think what's going on is that Steve responds to the desires of the user, particularly the user who wants to upgrade and give him money.

          But even I will admit, getting rid of key caps was just plain dumb. Nobody's perfect, not even Steve.

          But at least he does care, and that's why I stick with him.

          D

        • Re:Gone (Score:5, Informative)

          by sammy baby ( 14909 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @01:16PM (#14211535) Journal
          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 [wikipedia.org]? 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 [arstechnica.com] (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 (Score:3, Insightful)

          by ucblockhead ( 63650 )
          Committees are poison to software.

        • Re:Gone (Score:5, Interesting)

          by javaxman ( 705658 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @03:00PM (#14212538) Journal
          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 ?

          • Inconsistency (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Savage-Rabbit ( 308260 )
            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

          • Re:Gone (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Burz ( 138833 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @05:02PM (#14213728) Homepage Journal
            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.

            • Re:Gone (Score:3, Interesting)

              by javaxman ( 705658 )
              But now people can more quickly discern an application by variations in window style... and that certainly works in favor of Expose.

              I've been grasping for a *reason* for the difference between these applications... that's actually the main thing that bugs me. I'm not sure I so much mind applications having different basic looks so much as long as there is a *reason*. I've never heard a reason for these differences that made sense to me.

              Safari is just plain ol' Brushed Metal, it's different from regular-loo

      • Re:Gone (Score:5, Insightful)

        by iabervon ( 1971 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @01:37PM (#14211738) Homepage Journal
        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 (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Lodragandraoidh ( 639696 )
        One perfect user interface paradigm is not achieveable(sic) because people are all different.

        I see better user interfaces in pc games than I do in other software. This is primarily because game designers realized years ago that everyone has their own prefered way of interacting with the input interfaces. This led to the ability for the end user to modify the input options (such as a keyboard mapper and joystick macros).

        A better approach for all software would be to build an infinitely modifiable interface

        • Re:Gone (Score:3, Insightful)

          by daviddennis ( 10926 )
          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 remembe

      • Re:Gone (Score:3, Interesting)

        by nathanh ( 1214 )

        I can tell you that in my experience, the best software by far comes from Apple,

        The best software (IMO) comes from small groups or individuals with exceptional talent, never from a gigantic corporation. The problem with a large corporation is that quality tends to dilute as mediocre people are hired, rot sets in, projects atrophy, clueless managers cut funding, stupid ideas are pushed, brilliant ideas are ignored, problems are neglected and faults are left unfixed for years.

        I can reel off dozens of

    • Re:Gone (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Golias ( 176380 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @11:58AM (#14210790)
      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.

      • WOZ is very smart (Score:3, Insightful)

        by geekoid ( 135745 )
        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.

    • Re:Gone (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tpgp ( 48001 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @12:16PM (#14210964) Homepage
      From Woz's website [woz.org]
      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.

  • who? (Score:5, Funny)

    by BushCheney08 ( 917605 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @11:31AM (#14210560)
    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? (Score:5, Funny)

    by CaymanIslandCarpedie ( 868408 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @11:33AM (#14210576) Journal
    I get the worst, worst software almost always from Apple.

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

  • Perhaps he's right (Score:3, Funny)

    by drhamad ( 868567 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @11:38AM (#14210615)
    Perhaps he's right, he does get the worst software from Apple... (ok, there's two ways I can go with this) 1. But at least Apple patches them or 2. That's because Apple doesn't like him very much Take your pick ;)
    • Perhaps he's right, he does get the worst software from Apple... (ok, there's two ways I can go with this) 1. But at least Apple patches them or 2. That's because Apple doesn't like him very much Take your pick ;)

      I'm going with 2. I bet Apple finds out where he is going to get his next apple software from and then sends him crap just to mess with him. He could get "the good stuff" if only he wore his tinfoil hat.

  • Refeshing change... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Chaffar ( 670874 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @11:38AM (#14210621)
    Apple has been very adamant and has stuck by their guns for a long, long time and they put everything at risk in the company many times to basically say that we're going to be a proprietary operating system and you're going to have to buy our hardware to run it.

    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.

  • Obvious? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Red Flayer ( 890720 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @11:41AM (#14210631) Journal
    "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? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ucblockhead ( 63650 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @12:02PM (#14210829) Homepage Journal
      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.

      • Re:Obvious? (Score:3, Funny)

        by CodeHog ( 666724 )
        Sounds like somebody has a case of the Mondays!

      • Re:Obvious? (Score:3, Funny)

        by thebdj ( 768618 )
        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.

        Or in Microsoft's case because they created the poor quality crap tools themselves.

      • Re:Obvious? (Score:3, Funny)

        by hackstraw ( 262471 ) *

        I must have worked at the same place. Or are they all like that?

      • Re:Obvious? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by fak3r ( 917687 )
        Uhh...did I write this, or are you working 10 rows away from me at my current job? I agree with ALL of your points, and at this Mega-corp (~12,000) employees, working with software (and servers) is painful. I'm currently writing a change request where one script will be added to a daily cron on two servers - it's taking me 45 minutes to write it and lay out all 6 approvers! my last gig was at a startup, 30 ppl when I started, 3 years later 50 ppl. Needless to say I could do anything there, I had an idea

  • Clearly (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tiberius_Fel ( 770739 ) <fel AT empirereborn DOT net> on Thursday December 08, 2005 @11:41AM (#14210632)
    Clearly, he doesn't get any software from any of the other companies named. :P

  • Woz is from a different era (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ACK!! ( 10229 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @11:42AM (#14210642) Journal
    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?

    • Indeed (Score:3, Insightful)

      by itistoday ( 602304 )
      While I didn't read all of it, here's an interesting quote from Woz:

      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.

      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 bein

      • Re:Indeed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by PantsWearer ( 739529 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @01:55PM (#14211875)
        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:Indeed (Score:4, Insightful)

        by anaesthetica ( 596507 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @02:35PM (#14212289) Homepage Journal
        I don't think he's talking about the technical underpinnings. I think he's talking about software design and human usability. After a certain point, it doesn't matter what's under the hood. I think that he feels OS X abandoned OS 9's user interface guidelines in exchange for superior technical underpinnings but inferior usability dressed up in eye candy.
    • Woz is from an era in which software was fast, light, and did exactly what it said on the box and nothing more.

      WHEN CAN WE GO BACK. I am sick to fucking DEATH of multi-gig bloatware installs that try to impress 428 features I don't need and will never frigging USE on me. In fact, I still use old software for production use - Photoshop 5.5 - because the newer versions have nothing to offer me but a speed reduction and a slower interface.

      Monkeys!

  • What does he use? (Score:4, Funny)

    by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF ( 813746 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @11:42AM (#14210644)

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

    He must not buy anything from Microsoft or Adobe then.

  • That's why I like "Classic" Unix (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08, 2005 @11:42AM (#14210646)
    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.

    • Linux *is* just a kernel - it doesn't actually come with all the GUI 'bloatware'. If you really want, don't use a big distribution - roll your own. I learned C on a Linux system with a 40MB disk and 16MB of RAM (and had X with olvwm - not much space left over on that 40MB).

      There's no reason why you can't still do that with Linux. The kernel's a bit bigger than it was in 1993, but you can either build your own custom one, or only put the modules on you actually use. GNOME isn't part of Linux, neither is KDE.
    • You might be interested in this [joelonsoftware.com] for a different take on bloatware. Software requirements haven't gone up as quickly as hardware specs, at least as Joel proves through the power of anecdote. Those resources are there for a reason. It's not bad to use them.
  • break with the "tradition" of their insolance and:

    1) offer customers a sincere apology for their negligence
    (no court seems able to get a comprehensive conviction
    against any of them anyway, so they should't have to worry
    about liability), at the same time as

    2) distribute a genuinely effective set of patches to those
    customers as they wait for the company to develop a new

  • and a new geek fashion starts (Score:4, Funny)

    by MORTAR_COMBAT! ( 589963 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @11:46AM (#14210678)
    Wearing an orange Apple polo, dark dress slacks and a stainless steel, analog-and-digital Bell & Ross wristwatch, Wozniak greeted me at the door. After talking to Wozniak for five minutes, it was obvious there is weight to his reputation: he is affable, candid and sharp. The remarks that follow are excerpts from our discussion.

    Orange polo and dark dress slacks. Check.

    Multi-thousand dollar watch [abouttime.com]. Well, maybe some other time.

  • Sometimes it is the job, not the programmer (Score:4, Informative)

    by beforewisdom ( 729725 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @11:47AM (#14210685)
    Yesterday there was an article about 10 things Google trys to do to attract good programmers.

    In my experience the lack, or opposite of those 10 things can often demotivate otherwise conscientious, talented programmers from doing the best job possible.

    Big companies often do that, while doing other things that interfere with software quality.

  • Has Woz ever *tried* open source software? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Blakey Rat ( 99501 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @11:48AM (#14210703)
    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? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by wackysootroom ( 243310 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @12:13PM (#14210928) Homepage
      Before you paint *all* open source software with such a broad brush, realize that the fink repositories are open source and that OS X userland programs are based on open source. In fact this message you're reading has been served up on an open source webserver and has probably passed through several routers running open source software.

    • Re:Has Woz ever *tried* open source software? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MECC ( 8478 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @12:23PM (#14211028)
      "(*) Go ahead, call me a moron for not being able to get it to work. I know you want to."

      Not hardly. I've found OSS software has plenty of things/features that don't work, or don't work they way you'd think. Often, its because some package is still in early stages of development. People often install a linux distro with the impression that the *entire* distro is a finshed product, which isn't the case. Installing a linux distro is a different situation with respect to where various parts of the distro are at, and can be frustrating due the amount of information that needs to be assimilated to get a perspective that helps dispell the confusion.

      That said, I installed Ubuntu 5.10 on a thinkpad A22m, and I've only had one thing fail to work, minicom which doesn't talk to the serial port, and epiphany crashes from time to time (although it works). A quick laundry list of things that pretty much worked fresh out the install without a hitch:
      • GNOME & various preference applets as well as things like gedit, gipsc, etc.
      • KDE ( i did install kubuntu too )
      • Konquerer
      • Firefox
      • Evolution
      • KMail
      • Synaptic
      • Ubuntu's automatic update notifier
      • Aptitude
      • various net utilities like ping, traceroute, ssh, sshd, etc.
      • Bastille
      • Guarddog
      • Various xterms like Gnome-ternminal, etc.

      The following I just built from source, in the most thoughtless ./configure; make; sudo make install and they worked just fine also:
      • Ntop
      • mrtg
      • rrdtool
      • mrxvt


      I installed OSX 10.4 on an 800MHZ iLamp, and it crashes, and the mouse occasionally stops talking with the USB port - none of which ever happened on 10.3 - so its the software. Apple QA does seem to have taken a hit lately.

      OSS 1
      OSX 0


      I have to say, I think WOZ is right.

    • Re:Has Woz ever *tried* open source software? (Score:5, Informative)

      by eclectic4 ( 665330 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @12:28PM (#14211080)
      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... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Iriel ( 810009 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @11:48AM (#14210705) Homepage
    ...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.

  • The Wonderful Wizard of Woz (Score:4, Interesting)

    by digitaldc ( 879047 ) * on Thursday December 08, 2005 @11:48AM (#14210710)
    Points I came away with:
    -Apple is no longer what they were when they started out, and now their proprietary software sucks, the 3rd party Apple MAC software is great, and the Apple Macintosh software is great
    -Proprietary software traps you
    -Open source is good for companies that would like it, but Apple software is still better
    -DRM is a necessary evil in the digital downloading world, since people share files and hurt the artists
    -CDs and Itunes should be cheaper, artists should be able to set their own price
    -Software is huge, complex, over-hyped and under-supported and it is only going to get worse
    -Colleges should train people to design software with a humanist point of view

    After reading this article, you could argue that the computer industry is quite depressing if you start to think about all the different things he has mentioned. If you want to build a better computer/OS/hardware/software, you should not put large corporations in charge of development, leave it up to those with a more humanist point of view. The only problem is, if by humanist you are saying it is for the greater good or some moral good, it is inherently against the profit model and the actions of greedy corporations who are always trying to increase profits or meet projected profit expectations and deadlines.
    The Open Source community is the closest thing you can get to a 'humanist' point of view while computing. Since the profit motivation is taken out of the equation, everyone can benefit.
    • Well, he is very easy to agree with on these points.

      Open source is humanist in some sense, but not when it comes to the human-computer interface. People want consistency, but OS developers need the freedom to try different things. Also (speaking for myself anyway) programmers tend to devote more thought to the structure, or internal beauty, of a program than its interface. I think that almost any interface to a program that the author has either written or deeply understands will seem intuitive to them.

    • The only problem is, if by humanist you are saying it is for the greater good or some moral good, it is inherently against the profit model and the actions of greedy corporations who are always trying to increase profits or meet projected profit expectations and deadlines.

      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,

  • Hardware manufacturers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pubjames ( 468013 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @11:51AM (#14210740)

    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.

  • Death Star Syndrome (Score:3, Funny)

    by (1+-sqrt(5))*(2**-1) ( 868173 ) <1.61803phi@gmail.com> on Thursday December 08, 2005 @11:59AM (#14210803) Homepage
    Big-shop software, as a matter of fact, is always what made A New Hope somewhat plausible for me: the too-many-cooks oversight of a two-meter exhaust vent analogizes well with desktop infelicities.

    I'd like to nominate this phenomenon the "Death Star Syndrome," or DSS.

  • So, I know that everyone gripes about Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office, but in general, everyone I know that uses iTunes, iPhoto, and all the other Apple applications are really happy with them. Being a long time linux user, I haven't had a chance to use these apps... but... what are the complaints about them? I read the scathing Aperture, but apart from that people seem content.

    What are the issues I don't know about?

  • Joe Sixpack is at fault (Score:3, Insightful)

    by east coast ( 590680 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @12:01PM (#14210825)
    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?

  • It's no surprise (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Malluck ( 413074 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @12:29PM (#14211087)
    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.

  • Single Quote Headlines (Score:3, Interesting)

    by derubergeek ( 594673 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @12:36PM (#14211146) Homepage Journal
    I suppose this wouldn't have been much of a story if it had read:

    Woz Still Loyal Apple Zealot

    From the article: "...I love every part of the Apple world. The whole world of Apple works together."

  • What are you talking about? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Darius Jedburgh ( 920018 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @12:38PM (#14211176)
    He chimes in...
    Who? The friend or Steve Wozniak?
    how software from big companies suck so bad
    Please! It's 'sucks badly'. 'Bad' might be acceptable in speech but not in journalism. And 'software' is singular and the verb must match.
    The part my friend doesn't include is how he guessed a trick was performed and won a necklace from him!
    Your friend guessed a trick was performed? Surely you mean 'how it was performed'? And what does that have to do with anything? And where does the necklace come in. This writing reads like something said by Vicky Pollard [bbc.co.uk].
    ...and really care what they're doing...
    Was this really what was said? 'Care what they're doing'?
    The ones that have the most bugs, the most items that are supposedly in there but don't work.
    Hey! Who needs grammar when you can just string words together in any order you want?

    That was the most painful thing I've tried to read for a long time. Typos and minor errors I'll put up with (even though /. apparently has editors). But this reads like it was written by a retard.

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