My goal with this blog

I write about relevant changes in the way that people use the web and how startups are built to provide services and products for this ever changing wonderful thing we still know as "the web." As a former entrepreneur turned early-stage investor, my greatest hope is for this to be useful to other folks that are like me in the hopes that they can avoid some of the mistakes I've made.

From:
Antonio Rodriguez

What's up with all of these bugs in Leopard?

tech
by Antonio on

It must be a slow end-of-the-month press cycle because the press seems intent on proving to the world that Apple's OS X 10.5 (Leopard) was just too buggy to put out there, joining its Redmond cousin in the land of crappy desktop OS releases.

Personally, I've only been dealing with small annoyances (keyboard locking up, Desktop files flickering incessantly, Spaces not working, the Finder losing its handle to certain running apps) and not the really big stuff (network not working, data loss), but I am somewhat underwhelmed by what Apple delivered with this release both from a polish perspective and in terms of new capabilities.

Maybe what is happening now with OSX is that it has reached that level of maturity that most big software projects get to where it is very hard to make forward progress without noticeable regressions. This would be ok though because I'm fairly certain that better processes (Apple bring back the public beta please?) would take care of this.

sunset from delta shuttle

But maybe, this is about the fact that all of the big brains in Cupertino are now enamored with Apple's next platform, the iPhone.

Listening to the newly (re)launched Gillmor Group on the airplane a couple of days ago (this show is definitely an acquired taste, but one which I would recommend for nuggets such as this one), I heard Steve Gillmor defend Apple by saying that the iPhone was "the center of Apple's universe now" and that everything else including the computers and Leopard were just "peripherals." Sad as this may be to admit, it sounded somewhat right to me in that there seems to be a lot more "denting the world" potential in putting very capable portable multimedia computers in the hands of tens of millions of folks than in continuing to polish the desktop platform of yesteryear.

I'll be sad though; as the sun sets of the PC platform as the most innovative place to be developing, all of us who were introduced to computers through it will go through our own little pangs of nostalgia.

[Postnote: After writing/before posting, it occurred to me that projects like OLPC may have quite a bit of innovative growth in them... we will have to see]