Hacker News Reader

Comment by jad | Hacker News Reader

> I can only assume that there's some desire within Google to make sure the iPhone versions of their products are complete dogshit to try and encourage Android adoption.

Do people think companies really behave this way? "Hey guys, how can we make our products crappier? Surely if people think our iPhone apps stink, they'll be motivated to go out and buy a whole phone from us!"

There are a whole host of mundane reasons why products turn out worse than they could be, and they almost never include conspiracy or malice.

View on HN

I bet it's the same reason Apple products suck on Windows... the devs themselves just don't use the platform.

Well, I'm not convinced it's fair to say that Apple software is worse on Windows. I don't know anyone who's tried Safari on Windows (so maybe it is worse than on a Mac, but I wouldn't know) and while iTunes is certainly absolutely terrible on Windows, from what my Mac owning friends tell me it is just as bad on Macs.

> from what my Mac owning friends tell me it is just as bad on Macs.

Who told you that? I just launched iTunes on my Lion machine, it started up in 5 seconds and started syncing with my phone wirelessly while I scrolled through 18,000 tracks without stuttering & a track played.

iTunes for OS X is arguably a little bloated and lacking direction, but it's still hands down the best library based music player/jukebox for OS X. Nothing else even comes close.

To be fair, you come right out and say you have little experience on the topic either way, so why cast an opinion? As someone who uses Apple's software on Macs and PCs extensively, there is not even a debate to be had about where Apple puts its effort.

You can even test it yourself. Take any Mac, put Windows 7 on it. Launch a clean copy of iTunes in OS X, then reboot and do the same in Windows 7. The OS X version will start up instantly, the Windows one will stall for at least 10-15 seconds. This is just one obvious example, there are plenty more out there.

You're right that I shouldn't have offered a second-hand (my friends') opinion about iTunes and specially not without spelling it out. What happened was that I complained about iTunes on Windows (which I use to put stuff on my iPod Touch), specifically that (1) it sometimes incorrectly marked podcasts as played or as not played, (2) it sometimes hung trying to connect to the iTunes store (for Windows users: if this happens run ipconfig /flushdns in a cmd window and restart iTunes), (3) somethings where hard to find in the UI (I can't remeber my concrete example now, but I did mention it when I complained with my friends), (4) rearranging app icons on the iPod's homescreen is quite buggy: you often windup with empty spots or duplicated icons in iTunes, which then crashes if you try to sync. (I did not complain about startup time, since it doesn't really bother me; and I should also say recent versions of iTunes on Windows don't have some of these problems) My friends said that all of my complaints save for (2) also happened on Macs.

Actually, from what I understand, Apple products are used quite extensively by Google employees. I have friends who work there, and there are lots of developers there who use Macs for day-to-day work. My understanding is that the Google Voice iOS app began life as a Google employee's side project, scratching his own itch. I've heard that even relatively senior managers use iPhones as their cell phone. This speaks favorably of Google's corporate culture, in my opinion.

> Do people think companies really behave this way?

An interesting anecdote from the Steve Jobs biography:

Finding Nemo had just been released to critical acclaim and Pixar were in renegotiation talks about their deal with Disney.

(Disney's) Michael Eisner had one powerful trump card. Even if Pixar didn't renew, Disney had the right to make sequels of Toy Story and the other movies Pixar had made, and it owned all the characters from Woody to Nemo. Eisner was already planning -- or threatening -- to have Disney's own animation studio do a Toy Story 3, which Pixar had declined to do.

The threat had teeth not because Pixar would lose control of some of their characters, but because Disney's animation studio had been releasing flop after flop. After ten years of The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin, there were ten years of rubbish. As a company, Disney had been creatively brain-dead for a decade.

(Pixar's) John Lasseter was aghast at the prospect of breaking up with Disney. "I was worried about my children, what they would do with the characters we'd created," he recalled. "It's like you have these dear children and you have to give them up to be adopted by convicted child molesters."

Effectively, Disney's negotiation tactic was "re-sign with us, or else we'll spin up a shitty division to make shitty sequels of your movies!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_7_Animation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Story_3#Production

Effectively, Disney's negotiation tactic was "re-sign with us, or else we'll spin up a shitty division to make shitty sequels of your movies!"

That's from Pixar's perspective.

From Disney, it was more like this: "re-sign with us or we will utilise out right to produce sequels, for which you won't be paid"

ie, It wasn't a threat to do a bad job - as the parent comment says, companies (almost never) deliberately do bad work.

Deciding to do work within a limited budget is tantamount to deliberately doing bad work in many instances. For example, look at Disney's history with direct-to-video sequels -- they exist purely to make money, and contain little of the magic or refinement of their fully budgeted forebears.

Eisner might not have been thinking 'shitty', but I bet he was thinking similar things when approving The Return of Jafar. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107952/)

Furthermore look at the promotional poster for Toy Story 3. It's quite clearly a slap-dash effort made by a third rate hack. I mean, who recalls a product and leaves it on the store shelf, with a strategically placed sticker that could well be saying "NEW!"?

That poster could only have been made to intimidate Pixar.

No, you don't say "lets make crap". But you deny the proper resources. You place unnecessary restrictions on the project. You hire a bunch of iOS newbies and say "hey go make gmail, but you have to make it out of javascript in a UIwebview" and basically force the outcome.

Come on, hasn't everyone had to work on a project where the boss/manager didn't want it to succeed? Whether for political, personal, or boredom, people don't do their best work all the time. Not everyone is as demanding as Steve Jobs.

I think it's probably more that the Android apps team has a higher budget/headcount than the iPhone apps team (I have no idea, but just a guess).

More like "Hey guys, how can we make sure our products run better on our platform than the other one?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com