Red Hat Diaries/007b

Crow for Dinner?

It will take a lot for me to say this, but more and more I am thinking that the brainiacs in Redmond are really not that bad at all at system design - at least not in comparison to the pompous idiots in Cupertino.

Many pros may feel that things Microsoft are over-designed. This has nothing to do with the politics of the Beast - it's purely technical. They seem to get over-ambitious at it, and put in caveats early in the design stages to account for later needs. There is nothing wrong with thinking ahead, but there is a certain element of block-headed clumsiness about their efforts which is impossible to ignore.

And yet - their designs hold. While Cupertino's do not.

Take the listview as an example. The listview is ubiquitous - it's on the Windows desktop, and it's on the Apple OS X desktop as well, and you can't get much more ubiquitous than that. The Microsoft listview holds up to scrutiny, the Apple tableview does not. There's a world of a difference between them.

The Microsoft listview affords an elegant cooperation between control and code; the Apple tableview affords nothing. The suspicion is that Microsoft used their listview themselves quite a lot before releasing its API to ISVs, while Apple did as little with their tableview as they have with anything else in their Cocoa API.

The Microsoft nerds are always open to suggestions - their entire corporate mentality is geared to implementing suggestions (but not necessarily worrying about bug reports). The Apple turds are not open to anything: Their Cocoa API is already perfect, it's easy to use, and anyone not finding this to be true is an adversary that must be destroyed. Microsoft surges on. Apple sees a continually diminishing market share, where even their chunk of education has plummeted from 37% to 26%. It's no wonder.

NextStep has always been 'lickable' - so few have ever used it. But what people are discovering now, after the initial showroom flash wears off, is that it's also 'kickable'.

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