Kudos to Apple for Snow Leopard

While I am quite stoked about the iPhone 3G and will happily shell out $300 for my 16GB model in a month, I am also very pleased to read that Apple is pushing the pause button on new features for its OS X and instead concentrating on performance and quality. I think this is a great idea and, as Apple is known for, contrary to what other companies do, which seem to ever evolve products rather than perfect them.

Take Microsoft. I worked there for 2.5 long years in the Office group, and during that time the idea of locking down and working on performance was only a small section in the last few months of a development cycle. Here I am on my brand new laptop with 4GB of RAM and dual core Centrino CPU, and Outlook on first boot usually takes 60 seconds from click to usability. A minute for e-mail? I can still load pine in under 2 seconds on a heavy inbox. Sure, there's a lot more going on here, but I always secretly (and sometimes openly) wished Microsoft would stop everything for Outlook and Word and just concentrate on making them faster. Nope, they never listened.

It seems to have come back to haunt them with Vista, where they sacrificed performance and quality for the latest set of new features. What they ended up with was a much smaller number of features (WinFS anyone?), much poorer performance on good hardware, and a lot of people holding onto Windows XP closely.

So kudos to you, Apple, for focusing only on these critical things. Are there really that many new features people are dying for these days? All we want is faster, powerful, but easier to use machines, and you are leading the charge.