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"surely they can do both?" Are you sure? Top quality engineers don't grow on trees and relegating Mac OS X development to second tier engineers because you don'
by bjelkeman-again 17y ago
"surely they can do both?" Are you sure? Top quality engineers don't grow on trees and relegating Mac OS X development to second tier engineers because you don't have enough top engineers may be the road to ruin.
Just having billions in the bank doesn't mean you get top engineers when you are hiring. I rather have a somewhat slower developing OS, if the result is good, than a faster developing crappy OS. I was going to compare to Windows, but that is slow in developing and crappy. Oh well.
- cobralibre 17y agoAnd I wonder if Apple's insular corporate culture discourages certain kinds of top quality software engineers from joining? I've been reading about Robert Merton's idea that a key motivator for practicing scientists is recognition, so I'm thinking in particular of software engineers who are accustomed to the norms of open source projects. This might tie back to John Siracusa's recent observation that Google is "a huge gravitational sink for engineering talent," and Apple is not. There's a small discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1257201 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1257201
- bjelkeman-again 17y agoYeah, but most of Google stuff is closed source too. There must be other things that attract engineers to Google than just some open source projects.