Quote:
Originally Posted by postfader  And in big companies, it's usually not the technical/saavy developers who get to pick what bugs get fixed based upon technical goodness, or what they would like to see fixed (and I think Emagic did allow more of this). Management decides "what's important" to fix based upon what's needed to sell the product, and make money from it. |
I can't speak for Apple, but having worked as a software developer for a couple of medium-to-large companies for more years than I'm willing to admit, in my experience there is not a lot of distance between "technical goodness" and "make money" unless the company has its head rectally inserted, in which case they will ultimately go out of business.
Prioritization of bug fixes is a complex and subjective matter, trying to factor in how many folks are affected by the bug, how hard the bug is to fix (if crappy code requires a rewrite, it may be deferred for a planned rewrite, for example), who's complaining, how many developers are available, and what the developer feels like doing.
Ultimately, people complain because the bugs that are important to *them* aren't fixed quickly enough, but that's the luck of the draw.
Frankly, I'm not sure what a bug fix that would "make money" but is not technically important would look like. The software
is the product, and if it's broken enough so that people can't use it, nobody will buy it and it won't make money.
I'm not being an apologist to Apple here (I'm used to release cycles on the order of a couple of months myself, and a lot more transparency) but I don't think it's as screwed up as you imply.