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Comment by alyx | Hacker News Reader

Am I missing something here, why is this "news"?

This "can't get right on first try" happens to virtually EVERY company. We don't even have to look too far back to find examples. Just one example would be Apple releasing Maps, which was oh-so-perfect out the gate.

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I think the article is trying to say that for Microsoft, this behavior is the rule, not the exception. I was a bit surprised there was no mention of things like the Surface, Zune, Windows ME, etc. which all seem to fit the rule.

For Apple (in the last ~8 years at least) it seems to be the other way around, in that this behavior is the exception, not the rule.

Or even further back: Windows 3, Windows 98, Windows NT (early versions). There's a really really long history of doing that sort of thing at Microsoft.

Can't really compare to Apple releasing Maps though. They released maps because they had to, it isn't a feature neither a selling point. The contract with Google expired and the original Maps had to be phased out, also the YouTube app, and they had to come up with something. The app itself was superior, had good usability and cool features, but mapping data is largely a monopoly and you can't really compete without owning Navitec/Atlas/whatever.

They had another 6 months to update their Maps app... (released it in September or something, the contract ended in December).

They just wanted to take Google by suprise, so they wouldn't release their apps map on time and by this, they had upset their customers with a piece of crap product (Apple Maps :s)

Right, but even your example shows a reason why this approach is an issue. Apple Maps was late to the market - it came out after someone else (Google) already captured essentially the whole thing. Apple released a product that was maybe 25% of Google Map's feature parity and they were late to the party. They failed and now are trying to iterate out of a hole but their perception has already been set to "the inferior one" by most potential users.

But are there software companies that consistently deliver projects of the scale and complexity of Windows without hiccups?

Isn't the point exactly that Google and Apple are doing it with few major screwups? And in the near future we'll see Canonical and Mozilla's versions of mobile OSes, and see hoe successful they are.

Canonical is an interesting case. While all the others (except maybe Mozilla) do a lot of work on the systems programing, most of Canonical's system level stuff is done by many smaller, upstream, projects and Canonical is responsible for integrating them, and selecting ready for release versions. This allows them to much easier avoid to early to release problems, and direct their effort in a much more focused way on the end user experience.

Also, their duel release model (long term support and 6 month short term support) gives them a nice test bed where they can try out radical re-designs before forcing it onto the users, who can continue using the LTS release.

I don't think Apple or Google is doing anything nearly as complex as Windows 8, once you factor in the number of hardware partners and the constraints on backwards compatibility.

I still wouldn't call this "news" as I've heard this pointed out by numerous individuals before, but I think what he's commenting on is fundamentally different from Apple Maps. Maps' first release sucked, and they're obviously now working to improve it. On the other hand, other Apple products almost always "just get better", as do most other projects that come to mind. Sure, there are occasional bugs and gripes, growing pains, etc. but even when I used to be a big fan of Windows I noticed that they seemed to alternate between big wins and big fails. ME? Fail. XP? Win. Vista? Fail. 7? Win. 8? Fail. I'm less familiar with previous versions, but I suspect the general trend would continue fairly predictably. I'm less familiar with things like Office, so I can't speak from personal experience much there, but my point is just that Microsoft does seem to have a very strong alternation between fails and wins, which is different from simply a bad first-release.

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