[bad_user]

> why be content with the existing design!?

Because backwards compatibility is more important. We can't just throw everything away every couple of years. Besides, who is to tell that the newer design will be better? Judging by the history of our industry, I have some serious doubts.

[pcwalton]

> Besides, who is to tell that the newer design will be better?

As much as it's popular to think otherwise, this isn't true. Taken as a whole, newer things are more often than not better than older things.

For example, cryptography has been on a huge march upward since the days of Unix crypt().

[rusk]

I have a shining counterexample to your thesis:

    https://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/01/why-dns-in-os-x-10-10-is-broken-and-what-you-can-do-to-fix-it/

In almost all my experiences reimplementing established software in a commercial environment "building a better wheel" has met with failure. Or in the very least it took some time to get it back to a level of acceptable that our customers were happy with.

This idea that it's easier to start from scratch than maintain old code is almost always borne of hubris.

The thing that many people miss is that software in active use is a "living thing" that has undergone many evolutionary iterations between developer and user before it's been gotten right.

There is so much implicit knowledge & experience embedded in the code itself. When you say you want to replace something with a "new" version you're effectively doing something similar to sacking an experienced engineer and replacing them with a graduate.

That's not to say that good enough is good enough. But it's important to remember that improving on "good enough" is hard. If you don't have a commercial mandate or other good reason for improving it it just may not be worth your time.

[markhahn]

Apple is in the vanguard of only one thing: marketing.

[rusk]

What a lame and supercilious comment.

[theoh]

Even the great Butler Lampson has a slide set online which includes the item

Design (Apple's forté)

This is arguably a slightly more defensible version of the GP.

[rusk]

I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't heard of him before now. Reading his Bio he does seem like something of a heavyweight!

I have some sympathy for our friend's point of view here, even if it is orthogonal to what I was saying. Particularly more recent developments but I have no time for this kind of snarky, pugnacious sniping.

I would suggest that Apple's real strength (or should I say Steve Jobs') was "Product Development" which yes includes a large component of marketing and I really don't see that as a bad thing. It's not like what was being marketed was a substandard product? People paid a premium and got a premium device.

That you don't get the same quality any more is no reason to decry the brand itself as only being good at marketing. Their devices are even today physically manufactured to the highest standards, but historically they have developed superbly engineered products. Yes this cannot be credited to Jobs, but he did identify and harness the talent.

This topic isn't black and white and perhaps there are many shortcomings to Apple, and to Jobs, but this kind of single-line snark does nobody any justice, in particular the commenter himself.

[dredmorbius]

Cryptographic algorithms are, when they are shown to be better than old algos, better.

Many algorithms are shown to be not better than old algos, hence the frequent admonitions (see Schneier for multiple examples) against roll-your-own crypto. I'm trying to remember the name of a much-touted encrypted messaging application being advertised for use by Arab Spring activists which turned out to have massive vulnerabilities.

There's a list (which doesn't seem to include the one I'm thinking of) here: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2843372/popular-messaging-app...

The reality is that encryption advocates strongly encourage people to use tried and tested mechanisms.

Worse: cryptosystems, inclusive of the algorithm and all the support infrastructure around it are very frequently worse than old systems, and reveal very, very badly broken implementations, sometimes years down the road.

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/18197/why-shoul...

ftp://ftp.pgpi.org/pub/pgp/7.0/docs/english/IntroToCrypto.pdf

[kbart]

Cryptography benefits mostly from huge computing resources we have today and fundamental advances (math). Current crypto algorithms were impossible/impractical with hardware from just few decades ago. Yet we still suck at designing crypto systems.

[rlucas]

In finance we call the driver of this "survivorship bias."

IOW, your contention is true/truthy if you ignore the fact that there is a large selective pressure weeding out the "not better" new things.

[TeMPOraL]

In computing industry, there's little pressure for weeding out "not better" new things. Unix is a great proof of that. Solutions survive on basis of popularity, not technical soundness, and many things get continuously forgotten and reinvented a decade later.

[JoeAltmaier]

Often for good reasons! In my career, I've seen the pendulum swing from storage on every device, to diskless devices sucking from the network, back to storage. Many times. Never mind the philosophy folks quote; its about technology, or rather the relative speed/latency of network versus local storage. Its true in lots of things. Folks 'rediscover' messaging systems for redundancy and failover every 10 years or so.

[pjc50]

Exactly. Backwards compatibility is king. There have been plenty of research operating systems which never made it to popularity; not just Plan 9 but things like BeOS and Nemesis. The network effects driving people to consolidate on one system are huge.

Browser design is a mess, but that's because it's a battlefield between competing demands. We're very lucky it's remained open and competitive. There's an alternate universe somewhere where IE6 won and you have to use ActiveX controls to enter your government ID before you can post to websites. (Oh wait, that's South Korea in this universe http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-29617196)

You can write a better operating system, but unless it runs a browser and you can give it away for free it will have a very limited audience.