I’m still getting feedback following my recent BackSpin columns “Shattered Mac illusions” and “Shameful engineering ” that were critical of Apple’s iPhoto application.
Now while I would like to move on, there are a few points we need to clear up. First, to all of you who think that expecting Apple’s iPhoto to cope with 15,000 photos was way too optimistic, you should read Apple’s iPhoto Support Web site wherein it specifically states the software’s limit is 25,000 photos.
Thanks to reader Mark Robson for that link. Robson also mentioned that he runs a Dual CPU XServe G4 with 2G bytes of RAM under OS X Server 10.2 supporting 32 eMacs configured in a “managed client” setup. His problem? “There was such a memory leak in the AFP daemon that it would cause the server kernel to panic and reboot daily.”
He never found a solution.
“We were forced to completely disconnect the ‘managed’ configuration [after] four to five weeks of trying everything we could think to stabilize the situation and [finally] we set up each eMac as a stand-alone workstation. It’s been like that ever since.”
Robson concluded: “My experience leaves me to agree with your pronouncement of shoddy workmanship.”
But let’s also note that Apple is way beyond other vendors in some areas. Reader Rusty Carruth wrote, “a job ago I had a PowerBook … running a version of [Mac OS] below X. One day, something went horribly wrong and the system said I needed to reinstall the operating system. Horrors, I thought! All this set-up work I’ve got to redo! So I spent some time trying to work around it, finally gave up and did the reinstall.”
At this point most of us would expect the worst but Carruth got a surprise. “I was completely amazed – it did a reinstall and kept all my settings, somehow removing whatever had blown the system up! I had no more problems either. So, while some things are apparently not perfect, I must say that I was extremely impressed with how well it fixed itself in my case.”
Which, before you Macinistas out there firebomb my office, leads to my second point: I am not pro-Microsoft or anti-Apple. If you would care to peruse my previous BackSpin columns, you will see that I am an equal-opportunity critic. I have been as nice and as nasty to Microsoft as I have been to Apple.
Anyway, Microsoft and Apple aren’t the only companies that need to be criticized. As reader Bob Havey said: “After we get through swearing at Microsoft, Symantec, McAfee, Intuit, HP, Act, et al., we get to Linux – which is another whole can of worms. And don’t get me started on Oracle. … One would think that after 20 years we would have software that has been designed according to software engineering principles, but it hasn’t happened yet.”
We simply aren’t critical enough. I have been amazed at some of the stories you have sent me that, if boiled down to their bare essentials, amount to, “This vendor sold us some software for a lot of money and made lots of promises and we spent lots of money trying to make it work and at the end of the exercise [choose one or more of the following] our CTO fell on his sword / the disaster was hushed up / we never got [any or all] of our money back / it has become the project that will not die.”
This isn’t only an issue for enterprise systems; it also plagues personal productivity applications. Yet our criticisms don’t seem to get back to the vendors in a way that results in changes.
What if we were to expect the same kind of performance and feature improvement that the car industry has achieved over the last 50 years? Would that be too much to expect?
Critical comments to backspin@gibbs.com. (Oh, got Gearblog?).
