Yesterday Apple announced Ping, a network which many have suggested will replace MySpace and present a new competitor to Facebook. However Apple’s first shot at building a social network has many flaws. As such, there are many areas that the company needs to improve before it can be considered a legitimate competitor to Facebook. With a physical platform of distribution however, if Apple can fix the product’s flaws, there’s no doubt they could rise to become the most legitimate Facebook competitor.
You Can’t Import Friends

Right now, while there is ongoing debate about whether or not Ping was previously enabling the ability to import friend from Facebook, the reality is that at this point, you can’t import friends from anywhere. There isn’t even an email import functionality, which was the key tool that made most social networks go viral in the first place.
Ping Isn’t Global

Right now it isn’t possible to connect to Ping in the majority of countries. Instead, the service is currently limite to 23 countries. Given that most of my friends are in the U.S., it’s not a deal breaker for me personally, however it’s definitely going to be an issue if Apple wants global domination. Additionally, Ping only functions on Apple products! If Apple doesn’t open up their product to other companies, there’s no chance they’ll be able to kill Facebook.

Yes, iTunes doesn’t just run on Apple computers, however there are no other mobile devices that have iTunes or Ping available to them. Apple will need a more open strategy if they were to compete with Facebook in the long-term.
Uploading Photos Has Issues

I couldn’t get my profile photo uploading, and more significant is that photos must go through an approval process! That’s like an online dating site or something. Facebook thankfully has automated filtering systems. With all the software engineers over at Apple, you’d imagine the company would be able to come up with a more efficient system which doesn’t require the manual approval of all images.
Certain Areas Freeze

After trying to watch one of Lady Gaga’s videos within the service, I couldn’t figure out how to exit out of watching the video. This wasn’t the only area where I ran into minor user experience bugs that should have been resolved before pushing out the product. Then again, perhaps Apple has accepted the model in which products that don’t work are rolled out first and then the bugs are fixed afterwards.
Did I Mention No Friend Import?

This is seriously a deal breaker for any social network. It blows my mind that Apple would release a product that is missing some of the core features that are necessary for any successful social network. Then again, they released a phone that doesn’t work as a phone, so that’s not too surprising I guess.
Managing Another Social Network Is Annoying

I think Facebook may have been the social network which survived to the point where people aren’t willing to switch to another social network. Additionally, there is a large number of people who don’t use iTunes and they won’t install the software just to find out what music their family and friends are listening to. While many of us grew up on music, there are plenty of people for who music and computers don’t go together (GASP! Yes, those people exist).
I Need To Live In Apple’s World

Do you want to live under the control of Steve Jobs? Many have chosen to let Steve Jobs make their technology consumer decisions on behalf of them, however many people hate this. Just read yesterday’s comments on our Ping blog post if you had any question about whether or not people would make the shift. Even more significant was the numerous comments from our Page fans who said they had no interest in making the jump.
Outlandish Statements

Remember when Apple claimed that the iPad was a magical and revolutionary device? Try to find 100 people who own the device and say they love it. I own it but the only thing I use it for is reading books, and if that’s all I wanted to do on it in the first place, I should have just used my Amazon Kindle. While there are new forms of applications like Flipboard and Pulse, I’m not quite sure what’s magical about the device. Similarly, Apple claims that “Everyone who loves music is on Ping.” That’s a flat out lie. How are they able to make a statement like that?

The fact that Apple makes statements like this frustrates the hell out of me.
Nobody Is On Ping

Most of my friends aren’t on Ping as of right now. While I’ve found about 10 people to follow, every name I search for shows up with nobody, or some random person who I don’t know. Apple has a huge market potential, but just one day after the product launched, a very small percentage of that market has used the service.
Apple Manipulates Consumers

The last thing I hate about Apple has nothing to do with their social network. It’s that they don’t roll out features in certain products for fear of cannibalizing other product lines. For example, right now I have a Mac Mini running my home entertainment center. Yesterday’s Apple TV launched without the ability to browse the internet, simply because they don’t want to stop people from buying Mac Minis.

They clearly have the ability to add a DVD player and internet browsing functionality but they just chose not to. It’s a model that values exploiting the consumer over accelerating the pace of technology.
In Apple’s Favor

While there are plenty of reasons that Apple Ping won’t be as successful as Facebook, there are a few things that Apple has to its advantage. The first is that Apple has access to the largest set of digital savvy consumers. These individuals are likely to make online purchases, and more importantly, they make many of those purchases directly within iTunes. While a large percentage of the world is cut off from Apple, the company has access to the most influential consumers (those who spend the most on digital goods).

There are plenty of factors working against Apple’s social network right now, however the company has a lot of things that make it a competitive threat to Facebook: their payments platform, their large device-based distribution network, and a number of other things. Additionally, the battle to be the leading mobile social network has not been won yet. Facebook is clearly in the lead, however Apple just made their service compatible with the more than 150 million iOS compatible devices worldwide.

The bottom line is this: the battle to become the reigning social network is not over yet.

The Office Web Apps have been refreshed on SkyDrive and in Hotmail with several new features, including:

- Word printing. Now, the Word Web App offers the print command in the Word Web App editor.


-Excel charts and the auto fill handle. With the Excel Web App, you can easily insert charts and manipulate data in much the same way you can in Excel 2010. Also, you can now use the auto fill handle.


-PowerPoint clip art and more themes. With the PowerPoint Web App, you can now add high quality photos and illustrations to your presentation, as well as select a theme.


For more details on this update, check out the Office Web Apps updates blog post on the Office developer blog.

In June, we announced that as part of Windows Live Essentials beta, we brought together two programs, Windows Live Sync and the Live Mesh beta, into one: Windows Live Sync beta. We focused on four things with our beta release:

* Making it easy to access the PCs you use from anywhere
* Getting your files and folders on the PCs you use regularly
* Giving you enough space to sync your most important files and folders to the cloud
* Providing simple document collaboration over the web using SkyDrive

Since the release of the Windows Live Sync beta in June, over 240,000 people have tried Windows Live Sync on hundreds of thousands of devices, and have provided a lot of feedback. The average customer syncs over 675 files with an average file size of 1.8 MB, and uses 240 MB of cloud storage. We received an incredible amount of forum posts and comments as well as informal communication through our feedback site. We have been listening and have made updates based on your feedback.
Renaming Windows Live Sync to Windows Live Mesh

In our beta release, we brought the best of Windows Live Sync and Live Mesh together. With the addition of remote access and cloud storage, we understand that the new program does more than sync files. So following the beta period, we’ll be using the name Windows Live Mesh going forward, which we feel best reflects our broader goal of allowing you to access your stuff across your devices.
Giving you more information

A number of our customers noted the inability to sync hidden files, so we added this support. Another point of feedback was that customers wanted a list of which files were missing in a synced folder. Now when Windows Live Mesh detects missing files, you can easily see the file name and when and where it was last modified.

More cloud storage

We continue to see that the primary way customers are syncing files is between their different PCs (or Macs). And we will continue to make it easy to sync virtually unlimited amounts of data between your PCs. When syncing files to the cloud, beta participants get 2 GB of synced cloud storage. Only 2% of these participants are using more than 1.5 GB. However, Live Mesh offers 5 GB, and while only a small number of Live Mesh customers use all their space, we want to ease migration and increase the online storage limit from 2 GB to 5 GB.

A number of customers have asked why we don’t allow you to sync up to 25 GB, given that 25 GB is the SkyDrive limit. While we merged Sync and Live Mesh in this release, we did not merge the online storage system used for Live Mesh with the one used for Office or Photos on SkyDrive. This means that each system has different storage limits and is optimized for different scenarios.

SkyDrive offers enough storage for you to share documents and photos with friends, family, and co-workers. Hotmail offers enough storage for you to store your email, calendar, and contacts. Windows Live Mesh lets you sync all your files and folders across your PCs and devices, and provides enough cloud storage for your most important files. Over time, we’ll be considering ways to do even more to share information across these systems.
Performance and quality improvements

We’ve made several performance updates to Windows Live Mesh in response to your requests that will provide noticeable improvements to your experience. We worked on cutting the application load time in half and made syncing large numbers of folders and adding multiple devices to a sync folder faster. We’ve optimized both memory and CPU usage during sync activity as well as decreased CPU consumption by as much as 30% when Windows Live Mesh is idle.

We hope you enjoy these changes and take the time to install the new Windows Live Mesh along with the rest of Windows Live Essentials 2011 once it is released from the beta. In the meantime, please keep using the beta programs and keep the comments coming. Thank you for using Windows Live!

On Twitter yesterday I made the following comment:

We're not here to write software, we're here to ship products and deliver value. Writing code is just a fulfilling means to that end :)
For the most part, I received a lot of tweets in agreement, but there were a few who disagreed with me:

While I agree in principle, the stated sentiment "justifies" the pervasive lack of quality in development

Doctors with this mentality don't investigate root causes, because patients don't define that as valuable

That's BS. If you live only, or even primarily, for end results you're probably zombie. We're here to write code AND deliver value.

I have no problem with people disagreeing with me. Eventually they’ll learn I’m always right. ;) In this particular case, I think an important piece of context was missing.

What’s that you say? Context missing in a 140 character limited tweet? That could never happen, right? Sure, you keep telling yourself that while I pop a beer over here with Santa Claus.

The tweet was a rephrasing of something I told a Program Manager candidate during a phone interview. It just so happens that the role of a program manager at Microsoft is not focused on writing code like developers. But that wasn’t the point I was making. I’ve been a developer in the past (and I still play at being a developer in my own time) and I still think this applies.

What I really meant to say was that we’re not paid to write code. I absolutely love writing code, but in general, it’s not what I’m paid to do and I don’t believe it ever was what I was paid to do even when I was a consultant.

For example, suppose a customer calls me up and says,

“Hey man, I need software that allows me to write my next book. I want to be able to print the book and save the book to disk. Can you do that for me?”

I’m not going to be half way through writing my first unit test in Visual Studio by the end of that phone call. Hell no! I’ll step away from the IDE and hop over to Best Buy to purchase a copy of Microsoft Word. I’ll then promptly sell it to the customer with a nice markup for my troubles and go and sip Pina Coladas on the beach the rest of the day. Because that’s what I do. I sip on Pina Coladas.

At the end of the day, I get paid to provide products to my customers that meet their needs and provides them real value, whether by writing code from scratch or finding something else that already does what they need.

Yeah, that’s a bit of cheeky example so let’s look at another one. Suppose a customer really needs a custom software product. I could write the cleanest most well crafted code the world has ever seen (what a guy like me might produce during a prototype session on an off night), but if it doesn’t ship, I don’t get paid. Customer doesn’t care how much time I spent writing that code. They’re not going to pay me, until I deliver.
Justifying lack of quality

Now, I don’t think, as one Twitterer suggested, that this “justifies a pervasive lack of quality in development” by any means.

Quality in development is important, but it has to be scaled appropriately. Hear that? That’s the sound of a bunch of eggs lofted at my house in angry disagreement. But hear me out before chucking.

A lot of people will suggest that all software should be written with the utmost of quality. But the reality is that we all scale the quality of our code to the needs of the product. If that weren’t true, we’d all use Cleanroom Software Engineering processes like those employed by the Space Shuttle developers.

So why don’t we use these same processes? Because there are factors more important than quality in building a product. While even the Space Shuttle coders have to deal with changing requirements from time to time, in general, the laws of physics don’t change much over time last I checked. And certainly, their requirements don’t undergo the level of churn that developers trying to satisfy business needs under a rapidly changing business climate would face. Hence the rise of agile methodologies which recognize the need to embrace change.

Writing software that meets changing business needs and provides value is more important than writing zero defect code. While this might seem I’m giving quality a short shrift, another way to look at it is that I’m taking a higher view of what defines quality in the first place. Quality isn’t just the defect count of the code. It’s also how well the code meets the business needs that defines the “quality” of an overall product.

The debunking of the Betamax is better than VHS myth is a great example of this idea. While Betamax might have been technically superior to VHS in some ways, when you looked at the “whole product”, it didn’t satisfy customer needs as well as VHS did.

Nate Kohari had an interesting insight on how important delivering value is when he writes about the lessons learned building Agile Zen, a product I think is of wonderful quality.

It also completely changed the way that I look at software. I’ve tried to express this to others since, but I think you just have to experience it firsthand in order to really understand. It’s a unique experience to build a product of your own, from scratch, with no paycheck or deferred responsibility or venture capital to save you — you either create real value for your customers, or you fail. And I don’t like to fail.

Update: Dare Obasanjo wrote a timely blog that dovetails nicely with the point I’m making. He writes that Google Wave and REST vs SOAP provide a cautionary tale for those who focus too much on solving hard technical problems and miss solving their customers actual problems. Sometimes, when we think we’re paid to code, we write way too much code. Sometimes, less code solves the actual problems we’re concerned with just fine.
Code is a part of the whole

The Betamax vs VHS point leads into another point I had in mind when I made the original statement. As narcissistic developers (c’mon admit it. You are all narcissists!), we tend to see the code as being the only thing that matters. But the truth is, it’s one part of the whole that makes a product.

There’s many other components that go into a product. A lot of time is spent identifying future business needs to look for areas where software can provide value. After all, no point in writing the code if nobody wants to use it or it doesn’t provide any value.

Not to mention, at Microsoft, we put a lot of effort into localization and globalization ensuring that the software is translated into multiple languages. On top of this, we have writers who produce documentation, legal teams who work on licenses, marketing teams who market the product, and the list goes on. A lot goes into a product beyond just the code. There are also a lot of factors outside the product that determines its success such as community ecosystem, availability of add-ons, etc.
I love to code

Now don’t go running to tell on me to my momma.

“Your son is talking trash about writing code!”

It’d break her heart and it’d be completely untrue. I love to code! There, I said it. In fact, I love it so much, I tried to marry it, but then got a much better offer from a very lovely woman. But I digress.

Yes, I love coding so much I often do it for free in my spare time.

I wasn’t trying to make a point that writing code isn’t important and doesn’t provide value. It absolutely does. In fact, I firmly believe that writing code is a huge part of providing that value or we wouldn’t be doing it in the first place. This importance is why we spend so much time and effort trying to elevate the craft and debating the finer points of how to write good software. It’s an essential ingredient to building great software products.

The mere point I was making is simply that while writing code is a huge factor in providing value, it’s not the part we get paid for. Customers pay to receive value. And they only get that value when the code is in their hands.

Our eye in the sky reports two angry evil (but devishly good looking) cyborg units, XSP 2000 and TRS-80, are fast approaching Black Rock City. They are considered very armed and dangerous. In fact, they are mostly armed and not much else.
These cyborgs do not come in peace. I repeat, they are to be considerd hostiles. However, we’ve received a secret communiqué that reveals a weakness built into these cyborg models. Due to a lack of TDD during development, a bug in their FOF system (friend or foe) causes them to view anyone offering a frosty beverage to be a friend, not foe.

Any attempts to engage with these hostiles will result in calamity unless you offer them an ice cold beverage. For the sake of your beloved city, I suggest stocking up.

Intelligence confirms they are headed towards their evil cyborg camp at 8:15 and Kyoto on the Playa and are predicted to arrive on Tuesday morning. If we band together, we may be able to save our fair city by, once again, offering frosty alcoholic beverages in order to confuse their FOF system.

You’ve been duly warned.

This blog (and associated Twitter account) will go quiet for at least a week as communication systems are nonexistent within the Black Rock City area.