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Comment by tempodox | Hacker News Reader

I never understood those annual release cycles anyway. Too artificial, too forced. Great for marketing hype, accumulating bugs, and missing out on documentation. Bad for quality.

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You legit don't understand the need to placate Wall Street and institutional investors??

That's a want, not a need.

Until they start pulling investments.

The stock market is a secondary market, there's no "pulling investments", it's just selling stock back on that secondary market. Unless an investor bailing on a stock is so large as to impact the share price or they have influence/seat on the board of directors companies don't tend to give a shit. Even if a big investor sells stocks that doesn't necessarily mean there will be meaningful impacts on share price, the market is irrational.

A company's value, as assessed by the market, declining is not always, or even often, bad. Healthy biology demands regular cellular death through apoptosis. The corporate landscape should not riddled with cancers of companies refusing to die when it's due.

With "share price over all" mentality, instead of clearing up funding toward declining companies like GameStop and AMC, you get a sudden resurgence of investment toward them via weird things like gaming passive index investing as scammers and hopeful suckers encourage and fall victim to the efforts of C-level grifters who have decided to spend their allegedly exceptionally valuable expertise perpetuating the scam instead of cutting it short.

They do this all while attacking the immune system (short sellers) that is trying to accelerate us toward being rid of their sludge. It's a meta-human autoimmune disease.

I realize I'm taking this to the extreme, but there are small steps that echo this tendency to live or grow at any cost. Forcing out annual products with exuberant marketing campaigns as a substitute for substance is an indicator of weakness or outright lack of understanding that sometimes to go forward you have to take some steps backward.

Predictable cash flows are good for more-or-less everyone. Luckily Apple has a massive cash reserve and can easily take the short term hit. I suppose you can take advantage of that knowledge and buy when the reactionary investors sell on, perhaps, lower revenues if and when the time comes.

Sounds like you do understanding it

They made a lot more sense when Windows/MacOS were neck and neck, when Apple sold MacOS.

They made sense when iOS/Android were feature-leap-frogging.

They make little sense anymore but to support new hardware features.

You don't have to put every new feature in on the annual cycle. I'm pretty sure they were working on APFS for a lot longer than a year.

Yeah that launched as an unadvertised feature in iOS 10.3.

> I never understood those annual release cycles anyway. Too artificial, too forced. Great for marketing hype, accumulating bugs, and missing out on documentation. Bad for quality.

False! A foundational concept in Constraint Theory is that "Large Batch Sizes Increase Lead Time".

Apple should figure out how to release smaller batches more often to improve quality. They should figure out how to release the first day of the quarter, every quarter. And work backward on what needs to happen to make that happen. Then release first of the month, every month. Once again, work backward on how to make that happen.

For example, we release to the iOS App Store and Google Play Store first thing on Monday, every Monday. And we worked backwards to figure out what we needed to do to make that happen.

When something goes wrong, the batch size is small enough that we can quickly figure out what happened. Also, the release train is reliable enough that engineers can push back on PMs. "You are not getting this feature this Monday. You'll get it next Monday".

Large batch sizes and long release cycles are terrible for quality!

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