This was always going to wrong from the minute I read “we had a collection of demos ... and a hard deadline to launch a year later at a Photo exhibition”.

That isn’t a real deadline, it’s a management ambition. And a badly set ambition, based on some demos and the belief they could scream good code into existence.

Apple is getting better at this - see how it now pulls announced features from releases if they aren’t ready - but it’s still a terrible approach.

To make parents work weekends without their children for an entire 6-month period just to try and hit a management fantasy is a symptom of a toxic culture.

(And is also counter-productive. The slow and buggy v1 that resulted wasn’t good enough to capture the market — but it was enough to finally wake up Adobe, who dramatically accelerated efforts on Lightroom, which launched first on Mac and went on to dominate the market)