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I'm undecided whether I agree with your thesis, but I definitely disagree with much of your evidence. RSS was primarily a nerd feature in the first place Why

I'm undecided whether I agree with your thesis, but I definitely disagree with much of your evidence. RSS was primarily a nerd feature in the first place Why is the concept of a bookmark that can tell you when it has updates a nerd feature? This was essentially Apple's implementation in Safari. (At least, initially, I haven't paid attention to how it evolved). iTunes seems to have everything else in there already, one more tab that reads "RSS" wouldn't hurt. This exists. It's called "Podcasts", and it's wildly successful. Dashboard being a failure is clear. Here, we agree. I think that if it displayed among your other windows, rather than being relegated to a modal view, it would have been much more successful. I believe this was a decision for performance reasons, but it was still never corrected once performance was no longer a concern. Spotlight ... where was the value back when it needed to re-index on every reboot and dragged your computer to a halt? Anecdote != data, but I never experienced these problems, and I was running 10.4 on a G4 iMac, which originally came with 10.2. Honestly, I think Sherlock and Dashboard would be your two strongest arguments. Then again, let's look at iTunes. Sure, it's bloated now, and sure, they bought it, but the reason it won is because it really was excellent. (I say this as someone who used Audion for years and I still have a giant place in my heart for it). Solving music library management was exactly the right problem, and iTunes (& SoundJam before it) got this right far before their competitors did. How about iChat? It's built in, it's integrated, it's pretty darn good, but almost everyone I know who knows about Adium uses it instead.

tolmasky 16y ago
The iChat situation is actually more curious. It differs from everything else in a few regards: 1. Adium was an open source project that had barely started when iChat came out. The "true" competitor in this case was the official AIM client which I'm pretty sure Apple made a deal with AOL. -- This alone should disqualify it from any further discussion. 2. AIM is not the dominant network in most other countries (making iChat useless in those cases) 3. AOL owns the network and thus its pretty hard for Apple to outright "kill" other chat apps. -- Why is the concept of a bookmark that can tell you when it has updates a nerd feature? I don't know, but it is. I can guarantee you my parents don't know what RSS is. I think the story of RSS is probably pretty interesting, it may be the case that as social started providing better links than one-team blog sites, its use went down, but this is purely speculation on my part. -- Spotlight issues are not anecdotal, they were widely reported. Remember that this feature is now 6 years old, but just search on the internet and you will see that Apple's support forums and articles in Apple sites are full of stuff like this: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090422063557423 http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2009042206355742... https://discussions.apple.com/thread/507442?threadID=507442 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/507442?threadID=507442 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/467039?threadID=467039 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/467039?threadID=467039 (just a few, the more curious can track it more thoroughly) It was so bad for some people that a "spotless" application was created to remove it from particularly pesky computers (no zealots ever felt the need to remove expose). It received 4 mice from MacWorld -- http://www.fixamacsoftware.com/software/spot/ http://www.fixamacsoftware.com/software/spot/! This is all very well documented and 'it worked for me' is in this case the far more anecdotal stance. I will completely concede that these problems have for the most part gone away -- but again, its been 6 years. I'd hate it if this kills Instapaper and it takes a similarly long time to get parity. -- I mentioned iTunes in my original post as something that was successful, and my analysis was that it was because it was a "real" app: in other words, something Apple cared about and created a team around. I don't think Apple cares that much about Dashboard or Safari RSS. And yes I completely forgot about Sherlock: it does fit the bill really well. Remember how after a while they were shipping it with channels that wouldn't even work anymore? I think its funny that they still have a page for it here: http://www.apple.com/lae/sherlock/ http://www.apple.com/lae/sherlock/ (edits: added spotless link and grammar)

tolmasky 16y ago

The iChat situation is actually more curious. It differs from everything else in a few regards: 1. Adium was an open source project that had barely started when iChat came out. The "true" competitor in this case was the official AIM client which I'm pretty sure Apple made a deal with AOL. -- This alone should disqualify it from any further discussion. 2. AIM is not the dominant network in most other countries (making iChat useless in those cases) 3. AOL owns the network and thus its pretty hard for Apple to outright "kill" other chat apps. -- Why is the concept of a bookmark that can tell you when it has updates a nerd feature? I don't know, but it is. I can guarantee you my parents don't know what RSS is. I think the story of RSS is probably pretty interesting, it may be the case that as social started providing better links than one-team blog sites, its use went down, but this is purely speculation on my part. -- Spotlight issues are not anecdotal, they were widely reported. Remember that this feature is now 6 years old, but just search on the internet and you will see that Apple's support forums and articles in Apple sites are full of stuff like this: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090422063557423 http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2009042206355742... https://discussions.apple.com/thread/507442?threadID=507442 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/507442?threadID=507442 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/467039?threadID=467039 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/467039?threadID=467039 (just a few, the more curious can track it more thoroughly) It was so bad for some people that a "spotless" application was created to remove it from particularly pesky computers (no zealots ever felt the need to remove expose). It received 4 mice from MacWorld -- http://www.fixamacsoftware.com/software/spot/ http://www.fixamacsoftware.com/software/spot/! This is all very well documented and 'it worked for me' is in this case the far more anecdotal stance. I will completely concede that these problems have for the most part gone away -- but again, its been 6 years. I'd hate it if this kills Instapaper and it takes a similarly long time to get parity. -- I mentioned iTunes in my original post as something that was successful, and my analysis was that it was because it was a "real" app: in other words, something Apple cared about and created a team around. I don't think Apple cares that much about Dashboard or Safari RSS. And yes I completely forgot about Sherlock: it does fit the bill really well. Remember how after a while they were shipping it with channels that wouldn't even work anymore? I think its funny that they still have a page for it here: http://www.apple.com/lae/sherlock/ http://www.apple.com/lae/sherlock/ (edits: added spotless link and grammar)