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Most of the people I know that used to use Quicksilver now use Alfred: http://bagcheck.com/item/0238-alfred The rest are very happy with Spotlight, like myself.

On the other hand, the Reader button in Safari is awesome and if the new Instapaper-like functionality syncs that content, it will do quite well.

Also worth a mention for a Spotlight replacement: the fantastic and successful Launchbar. http://obdev.at/products/launchbar

I'll grant you that Spotlight could be a bit quicker and smarter, but I nevertheless use it all the time. I was never a Quicksilver power user, but I've found Spotlight adequate enough that I've never bothered installing any alternatives (ie. Launchbar).

I think this is actually the crux of the issue. Some really unique ideas were replaced with "adequate-enough" ones that ultimately had the (unintended?) consequence of killing those other special features. Some may say this is a good thing, but it a phenomenon that exists nevertheless.

Every item on your list is you projecting your personal opinions onto everyone else. Just because you and your Quicksilver-using buddies don't use Spotlight, Dashboard, or Safari RSS doesn't mean other people don't.

The features Apple adds are intended to add value and convenience for the average user. If you have RSS needs so great that you require a dedicated third-party application, you're more than welcome to use one.

I actually 1: did not use quicksilver, 2. did not use kaleidoscope, and 3. never used RSS. These thoughts are purely empirical:

RSS was primarily a nerd feature in the first place, which is why it is so silly that Apple added it for consumers, not once, but TWICE. No one actually uses Safari RSS. If they did, why the need to then add it to Mail.app? Would it add even MORE value to add RSS to the Finder too? Why stop there, iTunes seems to have everything else in there already, one more tab that reads "RSS" wouldn't hurt.

Dashboard being a failure is clear. If it was a success (like the App Store), we'd still see Apple touting widgets and maybe even selling them. The fact of the matter is that there is no ecosystem of people writing widgets for this thing. Dashcode was largely repurposed as an iOS web app creation tool (also unused by all). So the result: no Kaleidoscope and hardly any Dashboard use.

Spotlight: It has been shown to be much slower than other tools (and was terribly buggy for many releases, where was the value back when it needed to re-index on every reboot and dragged your computer to a halt?) Most of the "Add on" features are broken too: if you type a simple formula into it, it will show the result, but you can't copy/paste it, so what's the point?

I'm not hating on Apple, they clearly get a lot of stuff right (such as Expose!), but their track record proves they get more stuff right when its their own idea. These little feature additions that seem designed solely to kill third party devs seem almost like half-hearted mini passion projects of single engineers that then die when they get reassigned to something else.

Feel free to directly address each of my points.

fwiw, cmd+c will copy the result of the simple formula in spotlight.

Wow, I've been retyping the results of some simple addition every time I pay my bills for years now. Just assumed Command-C didn't work there, especially because it gives no feedback that it did. Thanks!

Either Apple have worked on the speed or hardware has just got better but Spotlight is very usable for most people I know. This is especially true of those on a new MacBook Air where it appears instant. Also if you use it a lot it caches the results you hit, so for repetitive app launching it has always worked adequately.

I'm undecided whether I agree with your thesis, but I definitely disagree with much of your evidence.

RSS was primarily a nerd feature in the first place

Why is the concept of a bookmark that can tell you when it has updates a nerd feature? This was essentially Apple's implementation in Safari. (At least, initially, I haven't paid attention to how it evolved).

iTunes seems to have everything else in there already, one more tab that reads "RSS" wouldn't hurt.

This exists. It's called "Podcasts", and it's wildly successful.

Dashboard being a failure is clear.

Here, we agree. I think that if it displayed among your other windows, rather than being relegated to a modal view, it would have been much more successful. I believe this was a decision for performance reasons, but it was still never corrected once performance was no longer a concern.

Spotlight ... where was the value back when it needed to re-index on every reboot and dragged your computer to a halt?

Anecdote != data, but I never experienced these problems, and I was running 10.4 on a G4 iMac, which originally came with 10.2.

Honestly, I think Sherlock and Dashboard would be your two strongest arguments.

Then again, let's look at iTunes. Sure, it's bloated now, and sure, they bought it, but the reason it won is because it really was excellent. (I say this as someone who used Audion for years and I still have a giant place in my heart for it). Solving music library management was exactly the right problem, and iTunes (& SoundJam before it) got this right far before their competitors did.

How about iChat? It's built in, it's integrated, it's pretty darn good, but almost everyone I know who knows about Adium uses it instead.

The iChat situation is actually more curious. It differs from everything else in a few regards:

1. Adium was an open source project that had barely started when iChat came out. The "true" competitor in this case was the official AIM client which I'm pretty sure Apple made a deal with AOL. -- This alone should disqualify it from any further discussion.

2. AIM is not the dominant network in most other countries (making iChat useless in those cases)

3. AOL owns the network and thus its pretty hard for Apple to outright "kill" other chat apps.

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  Why is the concept of a bookmark that can tell you when it has updates a nerd feature?

I don't know, but it is. I can guarantee you my parents don't know what RSS is. I think the story of RSS is probably pretty interesting, it may be the case that as social started providing better links than one-team blog sites, its use went down, but this is purely speculation on my part.

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Spotlight issues are not anecdotal, they were widely reported. Remember that this feature is now 6 years old, but just search on the internet and you will see that Apple's support forums and articles in Apple sites are full of stuff like this:

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2009042206355742...

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/507442?threadID=507442

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/467039?threadID=467039

(just a few, the more curious can track it more thoroughly)

It was so bad for some people that a "spotless" application was created to remove it from particularly pesky computers (no zealots ever felt the need to remove expose). It received 4 mice from MacWorld -- http://www.fixamacsoftware.com/software/spot/! This is all very well documented and 'it worked for me' is in this case the far more anecdotal stance. I will completely concede that these problems have for the most part gone away -- but again, its been 6 years. I'd hate it if this kills Instapaper and it takes a similarly long time to get parity.

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I mentioned iTunes in my original post as something that was successful, and my analysis was that it was because it was a "real" app: in other words, something Apple cared about and created a team around. I don't think Apple cares that much about Dashboard or Safari RSS.

And yes I completely forgot about Sherlock: it does fit the bill really well. Remember how after a while they were shipping it with channels that wouldn't even work anymore? I think its funny that they still have a page for it here: http://www.apple.com/lae/sherlock/

(edits: added spotless link and grammar)