Microsoft, Please Pay Attention to What Apple is Doing with iOS (Premium)

A second report claims that Apple will slow down the addition of new features to iOS in order to focus on quality. This is exactly the strategy that Microsoft needs to adopt. In fact, it's years overdue.

Bloomberg hired Mark Gurman for one reason and one reason only: His insider access to Apple. And it's paying off: This highly-accurate Apple watcher has registered scoop after scoop, and for this reason, I am taking his reports about Apple's iOS strategy changes as gospel. And he's now written on this topic twice.

In late January, Gurman reported that Apple was pushing some key new iOS features past this year's iOS 12 release. The reason? Software quality has nosedived in the most recent iOS release as Apple has stepped up the addition of new features.

Today, Gurman has provided a second report explaining how Apple intends to fix this problem. It is adopting a two-year development approach in which major features are being split between iOS 12 and iOS 13 (due in late 2019), which will give its developers some flexibility, not to mention more time when needed. The "renewed focus," Gurman says, is on "quality."

Exactly right. As it should be.

More to the point, this is the strategy that Microsoft needs to adopt for Windows. Again.

I've been preaching something I call "finishing the job" for years. For example, in 2012, I wrote that "Microsoft has a problem. It simply doesn’t know how to finish the job."

"The Microsoft culture has rewarded shipping a product or product version above all else, and if that product happens to be attached to some huge revenue stream, all the better," I wrote at the time. "The problem is that no software products and services are perfect and bug-free. And the dark half of that Microsoft culture is that there’s little if any reward for those whose job it is to set things right."

This culture persists today, of course. But the problem has been amplified by two things: A near-fervent desire in the Windows organization generally, and in specific teams within Windows, to justify their collective existence by continually pumping out major new features. And the epic failure of Windows as a Service, a make-believe world in which we pretend that Microsoft's oldest legacy code base can somehow be treated like a modern online service.

So let's examine both of those points in a bit more detail.

In a culture in which new features are valued over solving existing problems, the A-teamers will always be scrambling to make sure they're involved with something new and exciting. This ensures that problems---for example, the Windows 10 Copy and Paste bug---are never fixed, or are fixed very slowly.

It also ensures that users will be inundated with pointless new features----3D, Windows Mixed Reality---that few people even want. The employees responsible for actually fixing problems---let's call them B-teamers for lack of a better term---have little incentive to do more than the minimum. But fixing ...

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