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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 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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