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Apple does actually know how to run web services. They run the world's largest media store and one of the world's busiest online stores in addition to iCloud.

Apple does actually know how to run web services. They run the world's largest media store and one of the world's busiest online stores in addition to iCloud. Just because MobileMe was a piece of junk doesn't mean they are completely clueless.

jonknee 14y ago
For most of its existence it was the only store compatible with the far and away market leader for audio players. The store did not win because of its technical chops. To boot their media store is still almost completely cut off from the web (they did try and juice some SEO and have landing pages, but iTunes likes to pop up most of the time). They sure love relying on iTunes... iTools/.Mac/MobileMe and iCloud were all pieces of junk. As was Ping. As is GameCenter. And iMessage. They have a lot of work to do.
- taligent 14y ago
  Sorry but do you understand technology at all ? iTunes Music Store is a web service. Whether it delivers HTML or XML to a thick client is irrelevant. It still needs to deliver a tremendous volume of them in addition to managing the downloads. And by and large it has worked tremendously well. iTools/.Mac etc are all the same thing just rebranding. Ping was a product failure not a technological one. And GameCenter/iMessage use iCloud so not sure why you listed them.
  - jonknee 14y ago
    I'm sorry, but successfully running a digital download store in a desktop app does not impress me. Apple's innovations with the store were not technical but contractual (originally getting record labels to agree to flat per song pricing). iTools/.Mac/MobileMe/iCloud are all the same thing, but signify the number of reboots they have had over the years. Each time they say "it's fixed!" and then yea, it's not. Be my guest if you want to believe Apple is great at the web. Meanwhile Google will be feasting.
    - gaius 14y ago
      http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/01/07App-Store-Tops-40-Billion-Downloads-with-Almost-Half-in-2012.html http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/01/07App-Store-Tops-40-... http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/02/06iTunes-Store-Sets-New-Record-with-25-Billion-Songs-Sold.html http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/02/06iTunes-Store-Sets-... Hater be hatin', but what have you done that handled 65 billion multi-megabyte downloads, securely? And we haven't even talked about movies yet.
      - jonknee 14y ago
        They have had lots of security problems, but yes it is successful. It's also slow and outdated. I have not built anything that size, but I'm also not the second most valuable company on Earth. My point was simply that other companies are better at the web than Apple is and that shouldn't be the case considering their resources and the importance.
  - scholia 14y ago
    LOL at taligent. Did you experience that particular Apple disaster? I think that also went in for a certain amount of pleading along the lines of "crap isn't really crap, you just aren't smart enough to understand how superior we are".
nodata 14y ago
> Apple does actually know how to run web services. No, Apple can run a centralised download store where the content comes from a limited number of sources.
- taligent 14y ago
  Which is an example of a web service. Are you sure you're on the right web site ?
  - nodata 14y ago
    It's a category of web service. Other examples are services which take huge numbers of photos from lots of different users and process them, or files from millions of devices for backup. These Apple cannot do well.
tnorthcutt 14y ago
They know how to run them in that they have web services running, but I'd contend that they're not run very well. They are consistently slow, slow, slow, not to mention buggy. I just opened the Mac app store application, clicked the "updates" tab/button, and waited 15 seconds to be told that there are no updates available. When I install app updates on my iPhone (5, running iOS 6), the badge icon does not go away until I re-open the app store app, on a consistent basis (greater than 50% of the time). When the badge icon does show updates, tapping the updates tab produces a wait similar in magnitude to the Mac app store example above, even though the app already knows there are updates available, since it showed me via the badge icon! Apple's web services, in my experience, are comparatively slow when viewed alongside other major providers of web services.
- fpgeek 14y ago
  On the "slow, slow, slow" point, I didn't realize how slow iTunes was until just now. I recently got a couple of HD movies for my Nexus 7 from Google. I didn't really think that much about downloading them, just stuck the pin and they were downloaded reasonably quickly and painlessly in the background. But now that I think about it, the contrast with my wife's experience downloading HD TV shows and movies from iTunes could not be more stark. The downloads take hours. She'll often check and be frustrated about how little had downloaded. She'd sometimes end up reshuffling her downloads. Until our recent wireless upgrade, she'd worry about where to place her laptop, sometimes resorting to a network cable. And probably more frustrations I'm forgetting. To top it off, this is in a country Apple officially supports and Google doesn't. From my (admittedly limited, external perspective) I'd say Apple still has a long way to go with web services, including iTunes.
mikeash 14y ago
Their media stores take hours, sometimes a day, to propagate metadata changes. Any time an App Store app gets released or updated, there's a fun game where you watch it slowly propagate to visibility among your friends and acquaintances. Their store for physical goods goes down every time they make a significant change to the product offerings. Both are highly successful, but all this tells us is that a web service doesn't have to be particularly well run in order to be successful.
- jonknee 14y ago
  > Their store for physical goods goes down every time they make a significant change to the product offerings. That still amazes me. No wonder why WebObjects never took off...
  - taligent 14y ago
    WebObjects never took off because of pricing. And by the time they ported it to Java there were plenty of open source alternatives.
- taligent 14y ago
  >Their store for physical goods goes down every time they make a significant change to the product offerings. Many years ago it used to go down for technical reasons. Now it is purely PR/Marketing. They get massive traffic spikes whenever it goes up and it instantly results in thousands of web pages going up with free PR. Why would you give that up ?
  - Kylekramer 14y ago
    According to Gruber a few months ago, it is legit a technical issue: http://twitter.com/gruber/status/264135810566209537 http://twitter.com/gruber/status/264135810566209537
    - bitcartel 14y ago
      How does he know? He's not a WebObjects programmer and the tweet is quite vague ("certain types of changes") which implies he's not privy to any real information.

jonknee 14y ago

For most of its existence it was the only store compatible with the far and away market leader for audio players. The store did not win because of its technical chops. To boot their media store is still almost completely cut off from the web (they did try and juice some SEO and have landing pages, but iTunes likes to pop up most of the time). They sure love relying on iTunes... iTools/.Mac/MobileMe and iCloud were all pieces of junk. As was Ping. As is GameCenter. And iMessage. They have a lot of work to do.

taligent 14y ago
Sorry but do you understand technology at all ? iTunes Music Store is a web service. Whether it delivers HTML or XML to a thick client is irrelevant. It still needs to deliver a tremendous volume of them in addition to managing the downloads. And by and large it has worked tremendously well. iTools/.Mac etc are all the same thing just rebranding. Ping was a product failure not a technological one. And GameCenter/iMessage use iCloud so not sure why you listed them.
- jonknee 14y ago
  I'm sorry, but successfully running a digital download store in a desktop app does not impress me. Apple's innovations with the store were not technical but contractual (originally getting record labels to agree to flat per song pricing). iTools/.Mac/MobileMe/iCloud are all the same thing, but signify the number of reboots they have had over the years. Each time they say "it's fixed!" and then yea, it's not. Be my guest if you want to believe Apple is great at the web. Meanwhile Google will be feasting.
  - gaius 14y ago
    http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/01/07App-Store-Tops-40-Billion-Downloads-with-Almost-Half-in-2012.html http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/01/07App-Store-Tops-40-... http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/02/06iTunes-Store-Sets-New-Record-with-25-Billion-Songs-Sold.html http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/02/06iTunes-Store-Sets-... Hater be hatin', but what have you done that handled 65 billion multi-megabyte downloads, securely? And we haven't even talked about movies yet.
    - jonknee 14y ago
      They have had lots of security problems, but yes it is successful. It's also slow and outdated. I have not built anything that size, but I'm also not the second most valuable company on Earth. My point was simply that other companies are better at the web than Apple is and that shouldn't be the case considering their resources and the importance.
- scholia 14y ago
  LOL at taligent. Did you experience that particular Apple disaster? I think that also went in for a certain amount of pleading along the lines of "crap isn't really crap, you just aren't smart enough to understand how superior we are".

nodata 14y ago

> Apple does actually know how to run web services. No, Apple can run a centralised download store where the content comes from a limited number of sources.

taligent 14y ago
Which is an example of a web service. Are you sure you're on the right web site ?
- nodata 14y ago
  It's a category of web service. Other examples are services which take huge numbers of photos from lots of different users and process them, or files from millions of devices for backup. These Apple cannot do well.

tnorthcutt 14y ago

They know how to run them in that they have web services running, but I'd contend that they're not run very well. They are consistently slow, slow, slow, not to mention buggy. I just opened the Mac app store application, clicked the "updates" tab/button, and waited 15 seconds to be told that there are no updates available. When I install app updates on my iPhone (5, running iOS 6), the badge icon does not go away until I re-open the app store app, on a consistent basis (greater than 50% of the time). When the badge icon does show updates, tapping the updates tab produces a wait similar in magnitude to the Mac app store example above, even though the app already knows there are updates available, since it showed me via the badge icon! Apple's web services, in my experience, are comparatively slow when viewed alongside other major providers of web services.

fpgeek 14y ago
On the "slow, slow, slow" point, I didn't realize how slow iTunes was until just now. I recently got a couple of HD movies for my Nexus 7 from Google. I didn't really think that much about downloading them, just stuck the pin and they were downloaded reasonably quickly and painlessly in the background. But now that I think about it, the contrast with my wife's experience downloading HD TV shows and movies from iTunes could not be more stark. The downloads take hours. She'll often check and be frustrated about how little had downloaded. She'd sometimes end up reshuffling her downloads. Until our recent wireless upgrade, she'd worry about where to place her laptop, sometimes resorting to a network cable. And probably more frustrations I'm forgetting. To top it off, this is in a country Apple officially supports and Google doesn't. From my (admittedly limited, external perspective) I'd say Apple still has a long way to go with web services, including iTunes.

mikeash 14y ago

Their media stores take hours, sometimes a day, to propagate metadata changes. Any time an App Store app gets released or updated, there's a fun game where you watch it slowly propagate to visibility among your friends and acquaintances. Their store for physical goods goes down every time they make a significant change to the product offerings. Both are highly successful, but all this tells us is that a web service doesn't have to be particularly well run in order to be successful.

jonknee 14y ago
> Their store for physical goods goes down every time they make a significant change to the product offerings. That still amazes me. No wonder why WebObjects never took off...
- taligent 14y ago
  WebObjects never took off because of pricing. And by the time they ported it to Java there were plenty of open source alternatives.
taligent 14y ago
>Their store for physical goods goes down every time they make a significant change to the product offerings. Many years ago it used to go down for technical reasons. Now it is purely PR/Marketing. They get massive traffic spikes whenever it goes up and it instantly results in thousands of web pages going up with free PR. Why would you give that up ?
- Kylekramer 14y ago
  According to Gruber a few months ago, it is legit a technical issue: http://twitter.com/gruber/status/264135810566209537 http://twitter.com/gruber/status/264135810566209537
  - bitcartel 14y ago
    How does he know? He's not a WebObjects programmer and the tweet is quite vague ("certain types of changes") which implies he's not privy to any real information.