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It still baffles me that it's so hard for anyone other than Apple to make a single well-polished device, all the way through. If someone gets the casing right, they'll still mess up UI transitions that are meant to be seamless, create laggy or inaccurate touch input, fail to run at 60 or 30 fps, or make hilariously ill-informed UI decisions in the most frequently used apps (clock, settings, camera, ...). What's the explanation for this phenomenon?

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I think culture is a big part of it and promoting the right people. Most companies when it becomes the size of apple are riddled with politics and the people on the top get there not because they create/design great products but know how to play the "game".

One thing that strikes me about apple is their culture of secrecy. There are departments within the same company that are not allowed to talk to one another. When you have no idea what other people are doing, it's very hard to play politics and the only thing you can do is just do great work.

I think this is what Microsoft is trying to do by buying Nokia. It does fit with the Surface, which seems to have spurred OEMs to do a little better. It's hard for Microsoft to go to an OEM and critique the way they implement Windows without a functional example.

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