For many years I was a Microsoft devotee.
I laughed at all the Apple fanboys to the point that when I met one of Steve Jobs’ right hand guys, I proudly announced, “I’m a PC.” (I’m special that way.)
But in my old age I have seen the light. I now have a Mac and two iPads, and my only non-Cupertino-inspired device is my Samsung Galaxy S III. I kind of like the Google map app that actually gets me to my destination.
Which sort of gets me to my point.
Microsoft and Apple have two very different philosophies about when to ship.
Microsoft ships as soon as it’s good enough and then offers patches and fixes as bugs are discovered in the software. Microsoft software always kind of sort of works.
Apple, on the other hand, ships when it’s perfect. They have a near zero tolerance policy for bugs and defects. Steve Jobs was always willing to stop everything until they got it exactly right.
It is this dedication to perfection that led to my defection to the cult of Apple.
The challenge with the Apple approach is it absolutely, positively has to be perfect right out of the box.
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Us fanboys won’t tolerate iterations, updates or patches. We want excellence served in an exquisite black or white box. That’s why Apple Maps was such a crushing disaster.
If it were Microsoft we would expect the Denver airport to be missing the first time, we’d know they’d find it eventually. For Apple that kind of imperfection is intolerable.
Over the past 20 years we have seen the Apple-ification of the church.
