My vague understanding (just from reading blog articles) is that iTunes became an insane metamorphization of the Eye of Sauron, an infinite pit of quicksand (blub blub) and Yes™, Inc (all things to all people).

Y'know, iPod (and later iPhone) sync, music browsing and purchasing, (payment handling), intelligent media organization (or some approximation thereof), working with giant media libraries...

I get the idea that everyone just feature-piled on top of the SoundJam code without fully scaling the design to the point of being able to coherently load-bear the additional functionality. So basically failure to adequately PM where it counts. That requires PM that understands engineering, which is sadly a tall order out of the gate and generally the most crucial before projects get big and the need for support becomes obvious.

*IFF* that happened in this case (I have absolutely no concrete idea), my question would be a) where "Steve really wants this - put a good PM on it" and/or b) where "this code explosion is killing everyone, we need PM help", ended up.

iTunes history anybody? (Genuinely curious, wondered for a while)

Curious as well. All I can add is that iTunes also needed to run on Windows (and I believe QuickTime had, in effect, the old MacToolbox running cross-platform). So add throw that on the pile.

iTunes had to move fast. There was not time, from what I understand, to step back and refactor it in any meaningful way.

There never is time to refactor.

Adding on to this, I heard a rumor (probably here) that iTunes for Windows was ported by Apple porting Objective-C and Cocoa to Windows, which is part of the reason it acted so funny. I have no idea if that's true though.

Safari for Windows was a side effect of the porting work that was happening on the Store to move away from a custom renderer to just using WebKit. And the reason iTunes on Windows was the way it was, and indeed, why iTunes on Mac stayed in this hellacious status for so long, is that it was built on _QuickTime_, which brought most of the Mac Toolbox over to Windows, and then -- eventually -- Carbon.

Objective-C and Cocoa for Windows dates back to the NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP/Rhapsody days, but yes it’s true. Safari for Windows also utilized this, perhaps to a greater extent, because its UI looked significantly more like its Mac counterpart than iTunes did, to the point that even the text rendering was the same between Windows and OS X.

Yeah OPENSTEP Enterprise (OSE) was a commercial product sold by NeXT and briefly by Apple. Also later versions of WebObjects that ran on Windows provided much of the same tools.

Yea, the idea this is some concerted effort to sell more iCloud storage is kind of funny to me.

I'd love to see those discussions - "The OKR was to sell more iCloud storage so the Music team added half a meg of junk to every song file"

"Great!"

... I mean... weird shit has happened, but... I dunno, I've worked at quite a few companies and I just don't get the sense that that's Apple's MO. The bad publicity if it became public that they actually did this on purpose would be terrible, it seems pretty conspiratorial in this thread.

Also, Music is a real shit, buggy app that constantly annoys me.

What if the incompetence is maliciously decided upon? Hanlon's razor works for individuals, but falls apart for larger institutions.

It also falls apart any time there is a legitimate responsibility to do something. Negligence is malicious even if it’s convenient to blame incompetence.

Incompetent management wouldn’t be able to be consistently incompetent. That’s the big issue with incompetence.

Apple is unique in that their product marketing has a big role in the product design process. If you step back and look at what they do objectively, there are a few journey mapped “happy paths” that Apple designs to. They actively remove features that distract from the true paths.

It’s noticeable with them as Apple has no sympathy for legacy. But you can see it with other companies. An easy one is Google Drive/Docs - they make it easy to find a file, but didn’t consider that you may want to see the folder context of where the file is.

Less true in music. For example, iTunes Match is still a thing, even though it’s (mostly) obsolete if you have Apple Music.

Sorta. I'm an iTunes Match person. They sort of integrated it as Apple Music lite.

They wrecked the UI completely. Which makes sense - I imagine that the program management of iTunes Match is probably a low priority. Basically, i use search history as a sort of playlist.

I believe that you may be significantly underestimating the incompetence of most organizations.

If all of the individuals are acting without malice, how could the institution act with malice? Isn't the institution just the collective will of the individuals?

I could see it playing out like this, incompetence causes the problem, incompetence fails to identify the problem, incompetence fails to fix the problem.

> If all of the individuals are acting without malice, how could the institution act with malice? Isn't the institution just the collective will of the individuals?

I think we are on an unproductive tangent, but these are quite important questions. An institution doesn't have its own free will, so I don't think I can claim it can have "intent to cause harm", but it can certainly cause harm.

An institution is not just a collection of people, it is also the business processes and policies. While these are created by people within the institution, they stick around over time. As the world changes around the organization, well intentioned policy can begin to harm.

Individual employees following policy and normal business practice (i.e. just doing their jobs) can behave maliciously without their own intent to do so (sorry, my hands are tied).

An institution needs not only non-malicious members, it needs to constantly re-evaluate its practices. Importantly, when harmful outcomes are observed the institution must re-evaluate and adjust, otherwise the harm will continue.

It's not enough for members to conduct their own behavior without malice, they must also observe outcomes and actively fight against the inertia of existing policy.

That betrays the cooperative principle. Such an institution could not survive.