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A comment on Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months. Parent comment

Re:Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months by prawks on Friday August 23, 2013 @09:39AM (#6263484)
Also don't forget Apple has had it's share of failures under Jobs (MobileMe, arguably AppleTV, their desktop peripherals always sucked, plenty of failed products, etc.).
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Re:Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months by kaolinite on Friday August 23, 2013 @10:58AM (#6263981)
How on earth is Apple TV a failure? It's a product they don't really seem to care about and they have the majority marketshare[1] (in 2012) and have been selling millions of the things each year.

They have had failures though, of course. Ping was another, for example.

[1] http://9to5mac.com/2013/07/16/report-at-56-apple-tv-takes-ma...

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Re:Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months by nailer on Friday August 23, 2013 @12:27PM (#6264572)
Apple TV should be replacing cable set top boxes, the same way iTunes replaced music stores. It has yet to do that (Netflix has gotten closer than Apple has though).
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Re:Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months by kaolinite on Friday August 23, 2013 @04:10PM (#6265985)
It seems like they're moving towards it. They've been signing deals with cable companies and hiring people related to TV. It's certainly not an easy process, especially as people in TV are wary of Apple.
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Re:Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months by danieldk on Friday August 23, 2013 @10:47AM (#6263914)
Well, judging by the number of iMessages that arrive in a correct order on my iPhone/Mac and their inability to make iTunes Match stable, it's hard to believe that iCloud will be a success in the end.

Under Jobs Apple made stellar hardware and good-enough software.

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Re:Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months by potatolicious on Friday August 23, 2013 @11:59AM (#6264384)
Ehh, I think Apple's software is pretty good - note that this is speaking as someone who writes iOS apps for a living.

Where they fail is web services. Apple cannot engineer a decent web service to save their sorry lives. The Cocoa API is pretty well thought out, generally well-documented, and pretty well-engineered.

Then you get into things where you have to talk to Apple via a network. StoreKit? [shudder]. iCloud? [terrified scream]. iMessage? Oh lord.

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Re:Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months by danieldk on Friday August 23, 2013 @02:33PM (#6265430)
The Cocoa API is pretty well thought out, generally well-documented, and pretty well-engineered.

I agree, their APIs are generally very nice. But the last few releases of OS X haven't been great. Multi-monitor support will finally be fixed in 10.9, after having been broken in 10.7 and 10.8. Also, recent releases have become very slow. A 2009 Mac Mini running 10.8 is unbearably slow, while the same machine is on 10.6 is almost as fast as a recent machine machine with a SSD on 10.8.

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Re:Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months by scholia on Friday August 23, 2013 @07:30PM (#6266811)
Apple didn't invent Cocoa, it was bought in with NextStep to replace Apple's failing Copland development.

And along with NextStep, Apple got its new iCEO, its new head of hardware, and its new head of software ;-)

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Re:Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months by danieldk on Saturday August 24, 2013 @02:32AM (#6267893)
Right. Everybody knows this. But does it really matter? Both were the brainchild of Steve Jobs (Apple and NextStep) and arguably post-1996 Apple is NextStep.
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Re:Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months by scholia on Saturday August 24, 2013 @08:45AM (#6268500)
Everybody doesn't know it. Agree about the reverse-takeover....
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Re:Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months by gregd on Friday August 23, 2013 @09:53AM (#6263585)
I'm still pissed off about my Newton...
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Re:Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months by zeckalpha on Friday August 23, 2013 @10:15AM (#6263713)
That wasn't under Jobs. He put it out of its misery.
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