6 ms·

> "It was slow, when it worked at all," Williamson said. "The software was riddled with serious bugs. Those problems lie entirely with the original Siri team, c

by xiaq 9y ago

> "It was slow, when it worked at all," Williamson said. "The software was riddled with serious bugs. Those problems lie entirely with the original Siri team, certainly not me." Wow. It those were his original words, I don't doubt a bit that this guy should be responsible for Siri being left behind.

blisterpeanuts 9y ago
I know, I couldn't believe the chief of a major software product at Apple would talk smack about the previous team. It's what a newbie might do when he has screwed something up. Classic dodging.
electrum 9y ago
This also directly contradicts one Steve Jobs' management principles: > "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering," says Jobs, adding, that Rubicon is "crossed when you become a VP." > In other words, you have no excuse for failure. You are now responsible for any mistakes that happen, and it doesn't matter what you say. http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-the-difference-between-a-vice-president-and-a-janitor-2011-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-the-difference-...
- rxhernandez 9y ago
  Conversely you get handed a pile of steaming hot shit they call legacy code(and it lacks documentation and the variables lack names that hint at any meaning) and they're telling you it's completely your fault that you couldn't get something to work properly. Getting handed a huge amount of technical debt is a very real problem.
  - vincnetas 9y ago
    I think "reasons stop mattering" line is higher up.
  - wmeredith 9y ago
    Unless your VP title is window dressing, in that situation you call it like it is (garbage) and get started working on something that has a future.
  - xiaq 9y ago
    The industry does not lack programmers who can clean up technical debt or outright rewrite a legacy system. At least, I’m pretty sure that Apple doesn’t lack such programmers. A VP’s job is to find those people and give them the correct incentives. The VP has the rights to hire new people and restructure teams. The VP should use those leverages. At the VP level, how a particular codebase or team is doing simply doesn’t matter, as the VP has all the leverages for organizational shifts. Blaming a codebase or team only makes sense if the whole company cannot produce quality code, and it’s impossible to hire new employees that can. I am pretty sure that this is not the case for Apple.
    - xiaq 9y ago
      A hopefull adequate comparison would be this: you are a technical lead of at a company, you get really really high pay and you have a lot of fellow engineers under your command. You get handed a legacy system, and there are all all kinds of problems with it: 1. The system uses a database that is not duplicated. 2. The system has no monitoring. 3. The web frontend is written in PHP. What do you do? To fix 1, duplicate the freaking database. To fix 2, add some freaking monitoring. 3 is presumably the hardest to fix. But remember that you get really high pay and you have a lot of engineers. What did the engineers at Facebook do? They fixed PHP. Do you blame the previous team that made this horrible system? No. No. No. You own the system now. There are valid engineering approaches to fix. So fix it. It can take a while, but eventually you can fix it. In the worst case, you will have to rewrite. But that's still a feasible thing to do. Now substitute technical lead with VP.
      - knightofmars 9y ago
        I agree with this, the one thing I'll add is that you may also have to contend with the competing priorities of every other VP. Specifically in that Business Development VP may be saying, "We don't have time to do any of those things! We need X done now otherwise we won't get our customer!" And the technical VP response might be, "If we don't fix this now then we won't have _any_ customers." But in the end the financial state of the company will make the decision for you. If you're on the edge and you immediately need more customers to survive then you're going to forgo doing 1 & 2 and instead implement X that BD was requesting. Hoping that you can get enough breathing room in the near future to actually do 1 & 2.
tuna-piano 9y ago
It's so interesting that putting someone else down to make yourself look better almost always does the opposite. Surprising that a person at his level wouldn't be mature enough and self-aware enough to realize that.
IBM 9y ago
So Forstall and his direct report were responsible for two botched product launches, Siri and Maps. This is a big blow to the camp suggesting firing Forstall was a mistake.
- tinus_hn 9y ago
  Siri may have stalled now but it definitely wasn’t a botched launch. And Apple maps may not work great in all cases but it did succeed in forcing Google to provide decent maps on iOS. Before Apple Maps the vector maps were an Android exclusive.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - sjwright 9y ago
    Apple Maps is like Bing: almost as good as the #1 service, but almost is not enough to make anyone care. Apple Maps is remarkably good today, doing nearly all of the important things well. Here in Australia, it's on par with Google Maps for driving (slightly worse for novel route planning, slightly better for guidance) and when travelling to major world cities I've found Apple Maps is frequently better than Google Maps for navigating on foot and public transport.
    - lolive 9y ago
      Am I the only one who feels that Apple Maps drains much less battery than Google Maps?
    - jbg_ 9y ago
      when in major cities in China, my experience is that Google Maps is almost unusable (not due to the censorship, as I use a roaming SIM which avoids those problems, but rather due to wildly incorrect data, missing metro lines, etc), and Apple Maps is at least on par with the quality that Google Maps achieves in other countries, and often much better. I find it interesting that Google doesn't care enough to add the most recent several metro lines in (for example) Beijing or Shanghai, considering that many people try to use Google Maps in China when visiting and usually seem to end up switching to Apple Maps as a result of the complete trash the Google Maps experience is there. I wonder if they switch back when they go home.
jarjoura 9y ago
As an engineer who reported to Williamson, I’ve got to say I was far more intimidated by him than I ever was of Forstall. He rarely smiled in a meeting and his old school heavy handed management style always took the fun out of the work. Honestly, I don’t know the full details, but I still hold that Forstall took the fall for the poor execution of Williamson in the Maps debacle.
- IBM 9y ago
  >Honestly, I don’t know the full details, but I still hold that Forstall took the fall for the poor execution of Williamson in the Maps debacle. Well that's not true because Eddy Cue fired Williamson [1]. Maps might have been the straw that broke the camel's back, but Forstall was fired also because he couldn't work well with Bob Mansfield (who came back out of retirement after he was gone [2]) and Jony Ive. [1] https://www.cultofmac.com/203032/apple-svp-eddy-cue-fires-richard-williamson-for-botching-apple-maps/ https://www.cultofmac.com/203032/apple-svp-eddy-cue-fires-ri... [2] http://allthingsd.com/20121101/behind-silicon-valleys-un-retirement-why-bob-mansfield-is-back-at-apple/ http://allthingsd.com/20121101/behind-silicon-valleys-un-ret...
  - madeofpalk 9y ago
    Let’s be honest here - none of us actually know what went on.
    - happertiger 9y ago
      Someone here knows. Let’s be honest here. ;)
      - ksec 9y ago
        Then please set up a new account and tell us about it. I really like Forstall direction, and I dont think Maps was that much of a problem given it is still pretty poor after he left.
ilyaeck 9y ago
What a disgrace for a (former) leader to trash his team like this.
chris_wot 9y ago
Which means that frequent releases could have fixed the bugs better. Wow, that's a terrible excuse.
uptown 9y ago
From Dag Kittlaus, co-founder and CEO of Siri: "@Jessicalessin This statement, wholly false, was made by the architect and head of the biggest launch disaster in Apple history, Apple Maps. In reality Siri worked great at launch but, like any new platform under unexpectedly massive load, required scaling adjustments and 24 hour workdays." https://twitter.com/Dagk/status/974047743596404737 https://twitter.com/Dagk/status/974047743596404737

by xiaq 9y ago

blisterpeanuts 9y ago

I know, I couldn't believe the chief of a major software product at Apple would talk smack about the previous team. It's what a newbie might do when he has screwed something up. Classic dodging.

electrum 9y ago

This also directly contradicts one Steve Jobs' management principles: > "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering," says Jobs, adding, that Rubicon is "crossed when you become a VP." > In other words, you have no excuse for failure. You are now responsible for any mistakes that happen, and it doesn't matter what you say. http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-the-difference-between-a-vice-president-and-a-janitor-2011-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-the-difference-...

rxhernandez 9y ago
Conversely you get handed a pile of steaming hot shit they call legacy code(and it lacks documentation and the variables lack names that hint at any meaning) and they're telling you it's completely your fault that you couldn't get something to work properly. Getting handed a huge amount of technical debt is a very real problem.
- vincnetas 9y ago
  I think "reasons stop mattering" line is higher up.
- wmeredith 9y ago
  Unless your VP title is window dressing, in that situation you call it like it is (garbage) and get started working on something that has a future.
- xiaq 9y ago
  The industry does not lack programmers who can clean up technical debt or outright rewrite a legacy system. At least, I’m pretty sure that Apple doesn’t lack such programmers. A VP’s job is to find those people and give them the correct incentives. The VP has the rights to hire new people and restructure teams. The VP should use those leverages. At the VP level, how a particular codebase or team is doing simply doesn’t matter, as the VP has all the leverages for organizational shifts. Blaming a codebase or team only makes sense if the whole company cannot produce quality code, and it’s impossible to hire new employees that can. I am pretty sure that this is not the case for Apple.
  - xiaq 9y ago
    A hopefull adequate comparison would be this: you are a technical lead of at a company, you get really really high pay and you have a lot of fellow engineers under your command. You get handed a legacy system, and there are all all kinds of problems with it: 1. The system uses a database that is not duplicated. 2. The system has no monitoring. 3. The web frontend is written in PHP. What do you do? To fix 1, duplicate the freaking database. To fix 2, add some freaking monitoring. 3 is presumably the hardest to fix. But remember that you get really high pay and you have a lot of engineers. What did the engineers at Facebook do? They fixed PHP. Do you blame the previous team that made this horrible system? No. No. No. You own the system now. There are valid engineering approaches to fix. So fix it. It can take a while, but eventually you can fix it. In the worst case, you will have to rewrite. But that's still a feasible thing to do. Now substitute technical lead with VP.
    - knightofmars 9y ago
      I agree with this, the one thing I'll add is that you may also have to contend with the competing priorities of every other VP. Specifically in that Business Development VP may be saying, "We don't have time to do any of those things! We need X done now otherwise we won't get our customer!" And the technical VP response might be, "If we don't fix this now then we won't have _any_ customers." But in the end the financial state of the company will make the decision for you. If you're on the edge and you immediately need more customers to survive then you're going to forgo doing 1 & 2 and instead implement X that BD was requesting. Hoping that you can get enough breathing room in the near future to actually do 1 & 2.

tuna-piano 9y ago

It's so interesting that putting someone else down to make yourself look better almost always does the opposite. Surprising that a person at his level wouldn't be mature enough and self-aware enough to realize that.

IBM 9y ago

So Forstall and his direct report were responsible for two botched product launches, Siri and Maps. This is a big blow to the camp suggesting firing Forstall was a mistake.

tinus_hn 9y ago
Siri may have stalled now but it definitely wasn’t a botched launch. And Apple maps may not work great in all cases but it did succeed in forcing Google to provide decent maps on iOS. Before Apple Maps the vector maps were an Android exclusive.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sjwright 9y ago
  Apple Maps is like Bing: almost as good as the #1 service, but almost is not enough to make anyone care. Apple Maps is remarkably good today, doing nearly all of the important things well. Here in Australia, it's on par with Google Maps for driving (slightly worse for novel route planning, slightly better for guidance) and when travelling to major world cities I've found Apple Maps is frequently better than Google Maps for navigating on foot and public transport.
  - lolive 9y ago
    Am I the only one who feels that Apple Maps drains much less battery than Google Maps?
  - jbg_ 9y ago
    when in major cities in China, my experience is that Google Maps is almost unusable (not due to the censorship, as I use a roaming SIM which avoids those problems, but rather due to wildly incorrect data, missing metro lines, etc), and Apple Maps is at least on par with the quality that Google Maps achieves in other countries, and often much better. I find it interesting that Google doesn't care enough to add the most recent several metro lines in (for example) Beijing or Shanghai, considering that many people try to use Google Maps in China when visiting and usually seem to end up switching to Apple Maps as a result of the complete trash the Google Maps experience is there. I wonder if they switch back when they go home.

jarjoura 9y ago

As an engineer who reported to Williamson, I’ve got to say I was far more intimidated by him than I ever was of Forstall. He rarely smiled in a meeting and his old school heavy handed management style always took the fun out of the work. Honestly, I don’t know the full details, but I still hold that Forstall took the fall for the poor execution of Williamson in the Maps debacle.

IBM 9y ago
>Honestly, I don’t know the full details, but I still hold that Forstall took the fall for the poor execution of Williamson in the Maps debacle. Well that's not true because Eddy Cue fired Williamson [1]. Maps might have been the straw that broke the camel's back, but Forstall was fired also because he couldn't work well with Bob Mansfield (who came back out of retirement after he was gone [2]) and Jony Ive. [1] https://www.cultofmac.com/203032/apple-svp-eddy-cue-fires-richard-williamson-for-botching-apple-maps/ https://www.cultofmac.com/203032/apple-svp-eddy-cue-fires-ri... [2] http://allthingsd.com/20121101/behind-silicon-valleys-un-retirement-why-bob-mansfield-is-back-at-apple/ http://allthingsd.com/20121101/behind-silicon-valleys-un-ret...
- madeofpalk 9y ago
  Let’s be honest here - none of us actually know what went on.
  - happertiger 9y ago
    Someone here knows. Let’s be honest here. ;)
    - ksec 9y ago
      Then please set up a new account and tell us about it. I really like Forstall direction, and I dont think Maps was that much of a problem given it is still pretty poor after he left.

ilyaeck 9y ago

What a disgrace for a (former) leader to trash his team like this.

chris_wot 9y ago

Which means that frequent releases could have fixed the bugs better. Wow, that's a terrible excuse.

uptown 9y ago

From Dag Kittlaus, co-founder and CEO of Siri: "@Jessicalessin This statement, wholly false, was made by the architect and head of the biggest launch disaster in Apple history, Apple Maps. In reality Siri worked great at launch but, like any new platform under unexpectedly massive load, required scaling adjustments and 24 hour workdays." https://twitter.com/Dagk/status/974047743596404737 https://twitter.com/Dagk/status/974047743596404737