I’ve been working on one particular product, DM FileManager™, for about three years. Although the product is super rich and stable, things that would make a product ready for the public haven’t really been done yet, such improving error handling and building an install script to make it easy to install on any server. I’ve been pushing hard the last few weeks to get this part of the product built out so that it can be considered a public beta and ready to be installed for some clients who have shown interest in having the product loaded.

This is a very detailed process, and requires carefully going through the entire product and tying down all loose ends. Every software product undergoes this process, and some companies are better at it than others. Apple seems pretty good at it and Microsoft seems to consider this process “a waste of time”. This made me think about how differently Apple and Microsoft are perceived by the community.

Lets call a spade a spade and recognize that all software has flaws and could be easier to use or be a little more flexible. I know this is true because I have no piece of software on my computer which reads my mind and is 100% reliable. I’m a bigger fan of Apple’s products than Microsoft’s, but I’d be fooling myself if I were to pretend that Apple products don’t have flaws and aren’t sometimes as frustrating to use as Microsoft’s products can be. Conversely, despite all their problems Microsoft has some great products that make my professional life much easier, such as the .NET Framework and C#. But there is a huge disparity between how the developers at each company are perceived by their users.

Users of Apple products generally perceive the developers in Cupertino to be working their honest little butts off, selflessly devoting their lives to building the best software possible to serve our lives better. Each developer at Apple has a halo over their smiling heads and have pictures of every Apple user pinned up in their cubicle.

On the other hand, users of Microsoft products generally perceive Redmond to be a balmy 5000°F, and the developers there have spiked tails and carry Voodoo dolls of their users around with them, just in case they need to let off some steam. I know the guy who built the Visual Studio’s debugger has mine and hates my guts.

I remember when Safari was released for Windows, I had a discussion about it with a friend who happens to be a loyal Apple user. I complained that Safari is nothing more than a pain in my ass because all it does is give me one more browser to develop against without providing key functionality that can’t be found in Firefox. His reply? “Yes, they do their best to be standards-compliant, but I agree they aren’t quite there yet.” If we had that conversation about a Microsoft product, it would have ended with us forming a mob and carrying torches over to Redmond.