The Apple press release from last June includes:

… Rather than focusing primarily on new features, Snow Leopard will enhance the performance of OS X, set a new standard for quality and lay the foundation for future OS X innovation. …

“We have delivered more than a thousand new features to OS X in just seven years and Snow Leopard lays the foundation for thousands more,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience, we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world’s most advanced operating system.”

Although QA people love this attention to what we are passionate about, conventional wisdom in the software world is that a major release with few new features is suicide, but there are factors working in Apple’s favor.

I don’t find the current version (no snow) Leopard v10.5 to be unstable or buggy, but I know other people have problems with it. There are a lot of user interface (UI) inconsistencies in Leopard among the various Apple applications. I’m interested to see if Snow Leopard sports a more consistent and usable experience.

Apple is selling this upgrade for only $29 US, when their major releases normally sell for $129 US. At $29 Apple customers won’t be looking for much to think they have got a good deal.

Apple’s main competitor Microsoft has created this opportunity. Microsoft Windows costs close to $300. And although Mac OS X only runs on Apple hardware, people’s frustration with Vista’s bugginess and instability has led people to specifically look for a computing experience that address this.

People are hopeful for Windows 7, but it won’t be available until at least a month after Snow Leopard ships. We can expect Windows 7 to have a lot of customer untested technology compared to Mac OS X which looks to be is a very incremental release.

Performance (and polish) is a feature. “Ultimately that feeling of control translates to happiness in everyone. In order to increase the happiness in the world, we all have to keep working on this. Ultimately that feeling of control translates to happiness in everyone. In order to increase the happiness in the world, we all have to keep working on this.”, my boss Matt Mullenweg, Velocity 09 Conference Presentation.

Because Apple builds both the software and the hardware, they can release their next generation of computers to immediately take advantage of the upgraded 64-bit stack, OpenCL for graphic card processing, and GCD multi-core processing throughout Mac OS X.

If Snow Leopard is well executed and well received, it will help people be more confident on computers and expect more from their software. It will be a good day for QA geeks.

Thankfully, I was able to find the article using the Wayback Machine provided by the Internet Archive. I also found some of the awesome articles written by Vera Horiuchi.

Eli and Vera are among the most talents people I’ve ever worked with, but alas even more than me they weren’t software developers, and we were living in a software developer world.

Sure, there is some nostalgia mixed into my sadness, but the destruction of these documents is a good reminder of some things:

• Software is a lot more than code. It is an experience and different participants will appreciate different aspects.
• A team needs to have diverse leadership to create an experience that will meet many people’s needs.
• Respect and love your leaders even if you don’t understand their expertise. Seek guidance from experts you trust that do understand that area.
• Do garden your knowledge, but be careful not to discard knowledge out of ignorance. Technology today allows us to archive the knowledge for others to benefit from, refresh, or transfer.

Not because it shows how we we are doing (and will show when we screw up), because of the opportunities for others to use this knowledge and to collaborate.

When I chose to work for IBM coming out of university, access to IBM’s people, resources, and great knowledge were significant to my decision, but how empowering they are I did not appreciate until leaving the giant four years later.

Working for small companies Mercurial Communications, and then Flock, I really learned how important knowledge about customers, target markets, collaborators, and competitors is, but gained a taste of how to be creative in the absence of this knowledge.

That is when I really started to appreciate software as a service — although it already seemed like a natural fit for open source products. The relationships with customers and collaborators are invaluable.

When Chris “screenshot” Messina posted an image of Flickr’s Camera Finder and a link to Paul Kedrosky’s Flickr Blows up Market Research Biz my thoughts were confirmed. Paul gets it when he writes:

• “…people who are pursuing their own self-interest by participating in a giant market research project…”
• “It won’t be long before we see some software services companies make more money from ancillary data than from their app itself.”

Now, I don’t think Matt or any member of Automattic is thinking about making money in this way, but my point is how valuable this data is to Automattic, our partners and, of course, what causes a company to pause before publishing, our competitors.

Matt writes “far too many companies and services speak of their numbers in vague terms and toss around stats with no real meaning”. This could be revolutionary for collaboration and the whole software and services ecosystem.

Matt ends the stat pages by asking “think we should be tracking something else, or curious about more stats? Let us know in our blog.”

Update: Toni points out that LiveJournal publishes some stats. There is some interesting information there. As I mentioned to Matt, I’m interested to know what browsers, news readers, and email hosts people are using.