[Ti] 10.2.8

[Barry Lyden]

On Thursday, October 02, 2003, at 03:37PM, Steve Wozniak <steve at woz.org> wrote:

My two-week old powerbook that was running 10.2.8 just went to the Apple Store for repair today. It started freezing up last night. Although I can't say that it's software related, the quality issues nevertheless continue to mount. Another one bites the dust (sigh). 

On to my point though...

Steve is right. Corporations will not make public apologies very often. It's bad press. They will simply fix the issues and move on. 

Steve's other comment about Apple's testing center getting disbanded also struck a chord with me. As an R&D manager of a rather large operating system from a rather large computer company (which I won't name directly here, but we did buy another rather large PC company recently :-), I can tell you that developing, testing, and releasing a commercial OS is a very tough job. First there's the budget, which always gets cut to the bone in order to keep the company profitable for the shareholders. However, you still have to meet the same market window of opportunity. Then come the personnel cuts. After that, the capital expenses for new hardware systems to test with get slashed. All the while, everybody who is anybody wants (demands is more like it) something supported in the kernel. Then come the schedule slips and the feature cuts and endless compromises in order to appease management and the marketing division and get the OS out THIS YEAR - regardless. Then there is the testing. The testing is exhaustive. You test on more hardware in more configurations than you can imagine. And even though you try to test every possible, conceivable configuration, there's always that one you miss. And sometimes in your effortto tst EVERYTHING, you even miss something that seems rather obvious. So in the end, you live with your mistakes and fix them after the fact. And you learn from them. But unless the budget, staffing, and market pressure eases up, you go through it all again the next time. 

I'm not trying to defend Apple per se. I'm only trying to offer rationale for why things sometime end up like they do.

So Apple reduced their test lab somewhat and thereby reduced their ability to ship a high quality product. From the consumer point of view, the result sucks. From the corporate point of view, they probably made these decisions in the best interest of the business and felt they were worth the risk, all the while hoping that something like 10.2.8 doesn't happen. 

Then again, most of you will probably think I'm full of it. So never mind. 

Bets regards,
Barry

>Consumer rights are pretty much trampled on these days. You might have a chance in small claims court. This one guy had a few bad pixels and went to small claims court and won $5000 from Apple. The display was within the Apple specification but that specification wasn't public. In your case, you probably had a reasonable expectation that major problems would not be the outcome.
>
>But in your case, it's not worth much. I'm sure that Apple will have fixes for the bugs that were caused, soon. That's not too difficult for customers to install. An apology is what you'd need on the personal level, but companies rarely do that in such cases.
>
>How Apple handles this will make them appear as, or not as, Microsoft.
>
>There used to be a much more extensive testing department within Apple that could halt shipment of bad product. But that was disbanded. I'm pretty sure they would have prevented this problem from getting out, but you can never be sure.
>
>I don't know if the reason for the bad update has been publicized but what I've heard is fairly atrocious.
>-- 
>
>Regards,
>
>Steve  (is tv wake zone?)
>
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