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Apple’s WWDC Failure was both Technical and Architectural

by Nick 8. June 2010 17:02

Ok, I’ve resisted for as long as I could before posting this: Looks like Microsoft isn’t the only large organisation that suffers from technology failures during their presentations. I often criticise Microsoft, particularly here in Australia, of not being thorough enough in their rehearsals for keynotes, leading to demos not working. This time it was Steve Jobs who looked like an idiot on stage when he could access a website on Safari due to a network failure. Clearly there was a major oversight here when it came to making sure there was a backup network in the case of something going wrong.

I guess what made me smile was that this demo strengthens my argument against all those web developers out there that believe the answer to the world’s problems is another mobile website, or worse a RIA application. Current RIA thoughts, be they Ajax or Silverlight, just don’t get mobility and what it means to build an offline capable application. Having built for mobile on a number of platforms for countless year I believe that for your mobile application to be awesome, it must be offline capable. Yes, this means either packaging data with your application, or better, syncing with a server somewhere.

Unfortunately, do you think that Microsoft gets this – not a chance. Actually there are several teams within Microsoft that do understand this (eg Sync Services, Sql Compact, Merge replication and even Live Mesh). However, it appears none of them are currently able to influence the decisions to release Windows Phone 7 without either database or sync support.

Back to the demo failure at WWDC: Clearly they were going to show the rich capabilities of Safari…. My point is that if you are building a “rich” mobile website you’ve messed up your architecture somewhere along the line. Build rich applications using a rich technology designed for the platform. If you want reach, then build a mobile website that is light, fast, easy to navigate and gives the user what they want without chewing through their data plan. Yes, this means NO flash and NO silverlight on the page (not that either of these will render in Safari on iPhone/iPad/iPods)

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Tags: Windows Phone 7, Apple, Microsoft

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Comments (6) -

6/8/2010 7:59:09 PM #

Poor Steve, actually no, you're right - at the burn rate of the audience, there's no excuse for that. Blaming the audience for the lack of technology preparedness, however, is pretty poor at best and inexcusable at worst.

The demo gods do affect us all though. Have a back-up, have a tethered phone with another camera on it which you can switch to. Screen capture the demo if you have to. But don't give yourself an option to fail so spectacularly and don't blame the audience :-)

Cheers
Rog42

Rog42 |

6/8/2010 11:11:11 PM #

I can understand your rant about web apps not being reliable and the user exp being really sucky, using caching definitely steps up the user experience somewhat. But I'm having difficulty in understanding what the demo failure has to do with all this? He was trying to demo a browser and it failed coz of the crippled wi-fi network, where does offline data, caching fit into all this? Sure you don't expect him to open a cached page on the browser...

But do agree that they should have had proper backup for this. They knew over 5000 people will be attending, many of them reporters, live blogging, .. blaming the audience for the demo fail is no excuse.

Prabhu

PS: Your blog's theme makes it really difficult to read to the text, especially the background image. I can see how it is relevant, just saying :)

Prabhu |

6/9/2010 12:50:19 AM #

It's not that he was demoing a browser, because the iPhone has always had a reasonable mobile browser. It's that he was demoing the new features of the browser - most of them are there to support some aspect of rich user experience. My point is that when you are "browsing" the internet you just want a simplified interface where you can get the information you're looking for as quickly as possible - the mobile browsing experience is lousy and no-one really wants to do it.
Agreed it's a bit of jump to my discussion on sync etc, and perhaps I was trying to put too much of a rant into this post. RIA is about Offline and the sooner everyone wakes up to that the better. And no, I'm not advocating one technology is better than the other here, I'm just pointing to the fact that if you want to build a RIA app, you need to consider what the offline story is.

nick |

6/9/2010 12:58:37 AM #

I've just darkened the background - hopefully that will make the site more readable. Also apologise about the error when posting comments - not sure what's going on there atm.

nick |

6/10/2010 7:15:27 PM #

Thanks, the theme's much better now.

Prabhu

Prabhu |

8/9/2010 12:44:36 AM #