Oleg Andreev

John Gruber writes:

I’ve always thought Apple’s cash hoard was about freedom. That cash meant — and means — that they don’t have to answer to anyone. […] Apple can’t control its stock price; that’s in the hands of investors. But it can control how much cash it keeps in reserve. If investors sour (or the market crashes) and the stock price dips, Apple could take itself private.

This quote is a good example of a common misconception about who really owns the company. It is in fact, shareholders who own and control company. They are simply happy to delegate that control to current board of director for as long, as it is doing great. But when it doesn’t, it’ll quickly be replaced and shares will be sold to less pessimistic people.

About freedom: it only makes sense to speak about freedom where some coercion takes place. Like government regulations and taxes or somalian piracy. Otherwise, it’s all about mutually-benefitial partnerships. Better cash just helps negotiating things, but it does not buy any more freedom from any of the partners.

Apple is not even an acting entity. It’s a mode of acting of a group of people: shareholders, directors, employees. The company is used only to pool investments and limit liability of the owners and employees. And the real owners of the Apple assets are, of course, shareholders.

Therefore, Apple cannot get “free” from “investors” by buying itself and getting private. Tim Cook and others may buy Apple shares for their own money, but Apple’s cash does not belong to them at all.

Today shareholders are happy with what Tim Cook is doing. If tomorrow he announces a really stupid way to use company’s cash, owners will either sell shares or put another board of directors and CEO.

What Apple can really do? They can invest into a startup, people, factories etc. They can buy government to liberate themselves from regulations and taxes.

They can also pay dividends, but that is not a smart thing to do. There are only two ways you can spend dividends: consume them or re-invest in some other companies. While Apple is the fastest and biggest growing company, it makes very little sense to invest dividends into something else or to consume them. See also: Dustin Curtis on the subject.

It’s quite self-evident that many developers think that good tools “attract” developers to the platform and increase business prospects. But that is of course bullshit.

Microsoft, Apple, Google are not in business of selling developer tools. They sell their actual products to actual customers and optimize their production process to make their products better.

Improvement of a developer tool is not a function of your, developer’s, satisfaction and productivity. It is a function of your productivity and whatever design choices the company makes about their actual products. So you are only one part of equation. And normally, the smaller one.

If the iPhone is memory- and CPU-constrained, Apple is free to decide to not use a garbage collection and thus make developers less productive. They might lose non-paying developer (who potentially would’ve written a killer app), but would gain real paying customers.

Now, from the developer perspective, they are in the business of making products for people, not coding for fun. So they need a platform with a demand for their products. (Those who code for fun do not affect business decisions anyway.) A tool quality here plays only a role of production costs like many other costs. If the tool is so abysmal that its productivity cost consumes all the profits, then the platform won’t attract a developer. But if it’s good enough, it’ll be of course used provided the platform brings income to the developer. In other words, the primary force is the customer demand for vendor’s and 3rd parties’ products. Every other factor is a secondary.

Here’s a quite recent quote:

“But for now, Objective-C remains difficult to approach; only the appeal of writing hit iOS apps seems to be driving its popularity.”

Actually, the only purpose of Objective-C is to write hit apps (and the only purpose of apps is to satisfy paying customers). And if it remains “difficult to approach” for you, then you in particular do not envision some particular app worth writing given the current costs of mastering the tool.

Some people are asking Apple to fix the Radar. They demand a better UI, ability to open and comment on some bugs, integration with Xcode.

This is such a bullshit. Developers do not need a radar. Apple needs it. And they make it good enough for themselves, not for 3rd party developers. If the UI sucks and they get 10 times less bugs than people would love to file, it must be something they are okay with.

I personally, never care much about radar. If I noticed an annoying issue worth filing, I would file a bug in a minute and be done with that. I don’t care about browsing existing issues and figuring out if there’s already a duplicate. It’s not my job, after all. Apple guys should know better which bug contains new info and which is a pure duplicate. They deal with multitudes of product versions and different devices. I just have a couple of devices in some particular configurations.

Radar is a black hole. It would be more comfortable to get a quick response like “yes, we care, stay tuned”. But what for? Apple told us many-many times: please file radars, we keep track of all of them and nothing gets unnoticed. Do you really need this statement to be repeated for every request? I’m happy with “fire and forget” method: I spend very minimal time “managing bugs” and Apple somehow is able to fix the problems over time. They won’t tell you their roadmap anyway, so what feedback do you want after all?

Imagine Apple allows discussing radars in public. Now, instead of that many individual “votes” carefully filed by developers and classified as duplicates by Apple engineers, there will be less individual bugs and those will be covered with less informative comments like “me too” and “+1”. Essentially, that would mean that not Apple, but most active users are now classifying the issues, which makes Apple less efficient in figuring out their priorities. And the “most active developers” is absolutely not the same as the “most paying customers”.

Better UI and Xcode integration. Apple just needs UI suitable for their own comfort, not more. If they make UI very slick and fast, much more people will file the same issues and Apple engineers would have to sort out much bigger pile of duplicate bugs. And do not forget that every feature is a responsibility. Do they really need to constantly spend more time on a fancy bug reporting UI when the existing one works just fine?

Conclusion: file bugs if you wish and forget about them. When submitted, it’s now Apple’s job to deal with them. If you want to participate beyond that (that is, fix the bugs), then you already know what to do.