Maybe it's wrong of me to be pointing out votes, but it really irks me that the original comment is at 46 as of this writing, while yours is at 4.
So I want to comment in favor of stressing the above comments, hard. Considering a substantial discussion of the semantics of the word "hypocrisy" followed, with some people taking one side, and some the other, let's make a correction to the original presumption so that even those who didn't believe it to be hypocritical can come into agreement.
"The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform, Jobs cannot claim that least-common-denominator middleware is unhealthy for a platform." is false. The claim is that since Apple ships major OS X apps that don't use Cocoa, it's hypocrisy to attack Adobe on those grounds.
Edit: Actually Jobs's words chide Adobe as "the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X", so the debate might be a little bit more than moot. I still think it's entirely fair, though, to ask of Apple in the same vein, "Hey, why so late for you guys to fully adopt Mac OS X?"
The very fact that those are some of the things that have been criticized the most (the list would have had to have included Finder until a few months ago!) and with many cries to have them converted to Cocoa may reveal hypocrisy but it also proves Jobs' point: cross-platform, least-common-denominator stuff almost never provides the level of enjoyment that native, non-legacy stuff does.
Many think the web has proven that cross-platform apps are fine. It hasn't — the web is its own platform.
> it also proves Jobs' point: cross-platform, least-common-denominator stuff almost never provides the level of enjoyment that native, non-legacy stuff does
Not really. If the difference was that big, he would have devoted resources to porting his own software. Being the perfectionist he is, and not porting his own software, one has to conclude the differences just aren't that big.
The difference in maintainability is pretty big - iTunes and FCP are some of Apple's oldest application codebases at this point and both probably need a total rewrite to be up to their modern standards and work with 64-bit/background threading/etc. (They also both started out at other companies, though who knows what that means.)
I assume the reason they haven't been rewritten is the same reason that QuickTime 10 isn't finished yet. But I don't know what that reason is.
So I want to comment in favor of stressing the above comments, hard. Considering a substantial discussion of the semantics of the word "hypocrisy" followed, with some people taking one side, and some the other, let's make a correction to the original presumption so that even those who didn't believe it to be hypocritical can come into agreement.
"The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform, Jobs cannot claim that least-common-denominator middleware is unhealthy for a platform." is false. The claim is that since Apple ships major OS X apps that don't use Cocoa, it's hypocrisy to attack Adobe on those grounds.
Edit: Actually Jobs's words chide Adobe as "the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X", so the debate might be a little bit more than moot. I still think it's entirely fair, though, to ask of Apple in the same vein, "Hey, why so late for you guys to fully adopt Mac OS X?"