The Mac world has its share of douchebags, mostly journalists like Rob Enderle who still take pleasure in predicting Apple’s demise. One waste of protoplasm eclipses all of them, and he’s one of us: the dickwad at Rixstep. I’ve avoided reading his site until recently and I regret reading it.
The guy is upset because Mac OS X isn’t a “pure” port of NextStep, so he rants against every piece of Mac software.
Last week he posted a scathing “review” of MarsEdit that made Andy Ihnatko’s review look like a lovefest. His review doesn’t even mention using the software – he complains about the presence of a .Trashes directory on the DMG image and TIFF images in the application that waste a whopping 752K of disk space!
He blames every software mishap (such as QuickBook’s desktop overwriting bug) on Apple’s incompetence, in one of his typical rants:
Steve Jobs came back to Cupertino triumphant. Not only did he get to finally run his own company but he came with the world’s most fantastic system in his suitcase. A system the Grade A Idiots already ensconced in Cupertino have done their best to destroy.
Not that they mean to destroy it of course: they’re trying to make it better. But somewhere between their staggering incompetence and their unparalleled arrogance these graybeards manage to screw up in astronomical proportions time and again.
The QuickBooks disaster is not the first and won’t be the last. The ‘massive data loss’ fiasco before it wasn’t the first either. This has been going on for years – ever since OPENSTEP wasn’t allowed out the door in early 1997 and the Grade A Idiots decided to hold it back for five years and ‘improve’ it.
Now they have their improvements and the whole world is laughing at them.
This was the holiday market – and their sales are going to be a disaster. This was their walkover – and they blew it. Miserably. Worse than any other company has ever done.
There’s never been an IT company with such an inaccessible head start stumble and fall so bad and totally ruin their chances. The worst of it is a great many people may return to Microsoft – and that’s a another disaster of astronomical proportions.
Yesterday he topped himself by ripping off content directly from Stepwise and misquoting it to support his gripe about Apple’s “bait & switch”.
Scott Anguish removed his content in protest:
Although it makes me sick to have to do so, I have temporarily pulled the main page of Stepwise off-line. The rest will likely go this weekend.
The “Rixstep” site has stolen a large chunk of my WWDC 1999 coverage and republished it without permission. [url deleted]
Frankly, I can’t take the stress of fighting this with “Rixstep”, it makes me ill just thinking about it.
Let me just state…
I did not write this for him.
I did not write this for him to steal and misrepresent.
I do not agree that we were ‘lead down the garden path’, nor that there was a bait and switch.
My copyright has been violated by his reproduction. But given the track record, I see no way to stop him from doing this. He’s published incorrect information about me before.
I only hope that the long-time readers of Stepwise will recognize that this is not my feelings on the matter, and that my co-workers also understand this.
More blog coverage at bynkii.com.