[sargun]

At a big company, unless you have some serious lubrication, the first 12-18 months are spent landing. Usually you have to land your big changes in a planning cycle which are usually 6-12 months. This often means, for your first ~2 years, you're not able to do much.

That, plus the lost years of productivity during COVID -- I'd say it's okay to forgive for not turning the ship.

[hn_throwaway_99]

We are talking about 5 years, which is longer than the average tenure at most tech companies.

I also don't buy any Covid-related excuse with this one. If anything, I personally saw at least a couple companies make good use of the "never let a good crisis go to waste" mantra, using the general chaos of the early months of Covid to make some long-standing necessary-yet-painful changes - that is, changes that pretty much everyone knew were the way forward in the long term, but had risk of hits to revenue or much higher expenses in the short term. Using the pandemic as an excuse to go all-in on AI/Siri (e.g. "People are spending more time at home/on screens and we need a better voice interface") would have been the perfect approach IMO.

[aaomidi]

You're expecting incremental improvements.

Apple sometimes does incremental improvements, and sometimes does an entirely new release.

Five years to improve? Sure, probably could've done a lot. Five years to start completely new? Not enough time to make it land with a bang compared to the existing Siri.

[wkat4242]

Yeah when it's a new product it makes sense getting it right before releasing. But leaving their customers with crap for 5 years does not make ton of sense.

[kalleboo]

I guess there's precedent in that they did the same thing with the butterfly keyboard

[kortilla]

There was no lost productivity due to COVID in software other than than some short term pain. Doesn’t make up 5 years of nothing