Stagnant software

Two years ago I installed Mac OS X 10.4, Tiger. I thought this was a waste of money. There was no functionality in 10.4 that I really needed. However, I had the money and decided to spend it just for the sake of curiosity.

Yesterday I installed Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard. That was also a waste of money. Worse than that, it actually broke the way you easily could access items in subfolders from the Dock. So I paid to get less functionality. And Apple promotes this as one of the 300 new "features" of Leopard.

Certain things, like the once cutting edge tool Grapher have not been touched at all. Creating filters in ColorSync is still a matter of a large amount of patience to get around all the bugs in the UI.

This is not something that is typical only for Apple.

Microsoft do the same thing. There are certain things in MS Word, like the ways Styles are handled or Master Documents, which basically are so broken that they are unusable. They have been in MS Word for decades, and Microsoft does nothing to fix them.

IBM does the same thing with Lotus Notes. It is virtually impossible to change the layout of a table in Lotus Notes today, just as it was 15 years ago. But IBM does not care. They add LDAP technology and javascript, which is all well, but it is used only by the Lotus Notes administrators and designers. For each administrator there are typically dozens or hundreds of users, so the needs of the majority of the users are not taken care of. IBM cares about the decision makers in the buying process - not the users.

That is typically a great idea for short term revenue. It is not necessarily a great idea for long term customer retention.