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Something rather remarkable happened to me the other day. I was writing some code (Objective-C 2.0, Garbage Collected, on Leopard). I can't divulge the details of exactly what I was working on because the details of which are still under the NDA.
Basically I had written some code that converted some previously published Cocoa samples to take advantage of some new stuff that you can find in Leopard. My application was behaving really erratically and I was getting periodic crashes in random spots. Being a Cocoa newbie, I naturally assumed that I was doing something ridiculous and stupid, so I spent a couple more hours poking around before I gave up on it. Then, I sent an e-mail to someone at Apple containing my sample code. I humbly asked that he take a quick 30 seconds to verify that I wasn't doing something completely moronic with my code.
More than that, this person at Apple then had a developer take a look at the code. They ran my code, and reproduced the instability I was experiencing, and tracked it down to something that is most likely corrected in the next seed of Leopard. In short, they actually listened to me. More importantly, they took me seriously. Here I am, Joe Shmoe Cocoa Newbie, that has absolutely no business asking people at Apple to waste their time on me, and they went out of their way to not only verify that my code wasn't at fault, but also reproduced the instability, told me what might be causing it, and even sent my project back with a few tweaks and optimizations.
Any of you reading this who have been inside Microsoft betas know that the experience is quite radically different. There is a faceless "submit" button to which you can send your bug reports, but in all my years of testing Microsoft products, I have never received a reply to any of the bugs I've submitted, let alone confirmation that the issue was truly an issue and not a mistake on my part.
I realize that Apple is a significantly smaller company than Microsoft, so they are more able to respond in a one-on-one fashion. However, something tells me that if Apple were twice as big, they'd have twice as many people in this position to keep the responses available to Apple developers.
Anyway, I was so pleased with the experience that I felt compelled to write this post as a tip of the hat to the people at Apple who went out of their way to assist a Cocoa newbie in diagnosing a problem that could have been the result of my own idiocy and ultimately had nothing to do with Leopard.
And to think just last week I was complaining that all semblance of decent customer service had become as extinct as the dinosaurs. Apparently there are a few traces of good customer service left.
Not to diminish your account, but I have seen cases of Microsoft giving
replies to bug submissions, and even providing confirmation if the bug has
been addressed in a later build. But feedback tends to be faster for
testers involved in the newsgroups set up for that purpose, because
multiple testers can often validate and provide more information about an
issue for the developers to look at.
I'm certainly not claiming that MS never responds to bugs. I am saying that
in my experience, and the experience of all those I have spoken to who beta
test, there is a general feeling as though you just submitted a bug report
into a vacuum and it is gone forever. What impressed me most about this
experience was that I actually had a meaningful conversation with Apple
about the issue, they ran my code and reproduced my issues, without ever
once calling me a crackpot or accusing me of wasting their time. It gave me
the impression that Apple felt as though my time, feedback, and opinion
were important... I'm not used to feeling that way :)
Reading this makes me smile. It's little things like this that turn
arverage joe schmoe noobies into evangalists for a product.
I am not trying to get anything out of your experience, but just a warning
word: do not get too fond with that. The Apple I know is similar vacuum for
bug reports as you described Microsof. I hope Apple have changed for the
better, but I would not bet on it :)
"Then, I sent an e-mail to someone at Apple "
Patrick,
Maybe it's because I'm a certified Microsoft Partner, but Microsoft has
replied to all of my e-mails. They even had a representative work closely
with me when I beta'ed One Care on Vista for them. In fact, I know
partners have an account manager assigned to them as well; whom ofter calls
to check in. In the course of a week I can get as many as 3 calls from
someone at Microsoft. I know they also give 5 free programming support
incidents to partners too.
You have to pay money, and your company has to pass requirements, to be a
certified partner. Heck, you have to pay $110 to take the test just to
become a Certified Professional (MCP) with Microsoft :) So, while it may be
great if you work for a company (or are a company) that is Gold Certified
(I used to work for such a company), the rest of us have to deal with less
service than that.
That Apple is a significantly smaller company and so can respond one on one
is probably an erroneous assumption. I'd argue the opposite--Apple has to
cover many more bases to ship a well rounded Operating System and IDE,
which should make the one-on-one less likely event... However, I think
Apple is a very strategic (effective) in how it uses its scarce people
power and that is why it is able to surprise on many levels. BTW I enjoy
reading your blog.
I had submitted quite a bunch of bug reports to Apple regarding previous
versions of Mac OS X and have always had a very good response from Apple:
they would ask additional questions, trying to clarify the issue, and then
would always send me an e-mail saying that there's an update available and
asking if I'm still experiensing the same issue with the update or not.
Companies the size of MSFT are often bogged down with levels of bureaucracy
and onerous procedures. You could say that they are a victim of their own
success.
I've submitted around 150 bugs to Apple since I became a professional
software developer. I work for a fairly large Mac software developer, and
we try to work with Apple when we can. But even with our multiple
paid-develoepr Apple Developer accounts, I rarely get a reply from Apple
about my reported bugs. I've even reported kernel panics to Apple that
don't get more than a form letter reply.
Sometimes this black box can be extremely frustrating. The last bug I
reported to Apple was quite serious, and required hundreds of lines of code
in our product to work around. I reported it to Apple before Tiger shipped,
but for whatever reason they decided not to fix it it in Tiger. Fine. But
now the bug has been fixed in Leopard, and nobody told me how it was fixed.
I just got a form letter notification that the bug has been marked fixed.
So now I need to play hide and seek to determine how Apple fixed the bug,
and how their bug fix will affect our product's workaround for the bug.
Fun stuff as you can imagine.
I used to work for Apple (GER/A/CH) a few years back at ER and since I am
not 'silenced' by any form of contractual secrecy (not that it would matter
in this case at all, but nevertheless) at this time, I would like to tell
visitors to this blog:
