And then they made sure to follow through and make it work. Hiring people in itself doesn't lead to solutions. You have to give them the tools they need and set priorities acros teams accordingly.

Arguably if they had a half-decent team they could've done it without hiring the CUPS creator in the first place (like Apple did originally). Hiring him (which I support) simply gave them street cred and signaled to the company that this wasn't some unsupported effort.

Linux has really piggybacked on Apple's efforts with the result that printing is way better there now. Beyond just the years of their work on CUPS, AirPrint is the big deal. Almost all printers for years now understand one of the handful of image formats Apple supports for printers, and they advertise themselves and their capabilities with DNS-SD.

The result is that pretty much you can just print, driverless, to anything halfway recent. The driver situation was really uneven before.

I don't know why we really need Mopria, the system Windows is going with, when we have IPP Everywhere, but the differences between AirPrint, IPP Everywhere and Mopria seem pretty minor.