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"having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality." ... "We don’t need major OS re

"having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality." ... "We don’t need major OS releases every year. We don’t need each OS release to have a huge list of new features." I would argue everything we know about software engineering process says that more releases is better. Incrementalism lowers risk for engineers and for users. Once a year doesn't sound often enough to me, going the other way would just repeat Microsoft's failings. However it is possible that the core of his point, that marketing trumps what engineering can accomplish while maintaining quality, may be true. There seemed to be a lot of bolt on features in the last iOS & Mac OS X releases that didn't necessarily need to be pushed out right now, and some of the regressions are painful.

rsync 12y ago
"I would argue everything we know about software engineering process says that more releases is better. Incrementalism lowers risk for engineers and for users. Once a year doesn't sound often enough to me, going the other way would just repeat Microsoft's failings." Yes, but that can be in the form of .X releases, not X. releases. Which is to say, by all means release X.2 and X.3 and ... X.9 and so on ... keep polishing ! But OSX releases 5.X and 6.X and ... 9.X ... and so on. Those aren't the actual numbers of course, but it is major releases that keep coming rather than minor releases.
TomVDB 12y ago
He's not about talking about bug fix updates (the more the better), he's talking about major releases that introduce more features.