On Good Being the Enemy of Great
That we had to wait two years for the iPhone’s text selection and pasteboard is a good example of one aspect of the Apple way: better nothing at all than something less than great. That’s not to say Apple never releases anything less than great, but they try not to. This is contrary to the philosophy of most other tech companies — and diametrically opposed to the philosophy of Microsoft. And it is very much what drives some people crazy about Apple — it’s simply incomprehensible to some people that it might be better to have no text selection/pasteboard implementation while waiting for a great one than to have a poor implementation in the interim.
It’s hard to prove that good is the enemy of great, but the evidence speaks for itself.
I got into a back-and-forth about this with some folks on Twitter last week. A few said we should all stop lauding the iPhone’s cut/copy/paste, because phones have had cut/copy/paste for years now.
Phones have had lots of things for years now, but that doesn’t mean they were practical, logical or even enjoyable to use. I know that on my BlackBerry Curve, so many features were hard to find and use, and I was a full-bore BlackBerry power user. To more novice users, finding and using some of the features were downright maddening.
As Gruber points out, Apple’s tendency to release something only when it meets their standards is part of what makes them Apple. I’m not endorsing this approach blindly, like a party-streamer fanboy, because I certainly would have liked to see cut/copy/paste in OS 2.0 or even 1.0. I’m sure it could have been done. But, presumably, the implementation wouldn’t have been great, and that would have been a perpetual pea under Apple’s mattress. And users would have whined to the moon, because Apple users are obsessively vocal, which stems from being used to a great experience.
Love it or hate it, that’s Apple. It’s why their products are so widely applauded, even when users simultaneously are frustrated by the company’s lack of transparency and discussion about what its userbase thinks should be slam-dunk functionality.
