Could have spent the time filing a feedback request/radar instead of writing a blog post.
I have a 2 years old trivially reproducible "whole system crashes" feedback submission which doesn't get fixed.
The software program org decides what is going to happen for the next release, and engineers are assigned, and no resources are left to fix any existing bugs. The idea is for there to be “zero bugs” by the time a release is done, but this really means “any remaining bugs are punted to the N+1 release”. But when the N+1 release comes around, the cycle repeats and the program org picks the next thing to do, and everyone forgets about all the bugs that were punted. Repeat forever.
Engineers would kill for a “zero new features, let’s just fix bugs” release, but such a release would basically mean the program org has nothing to do, and the program org is in charge, so it never happens. They’ll mutter things like “we can’t go on stage and just not announce any features”, which isn’t wrong per se, but the first step to fixing a problem is to admit you have one, and that will never happen.
The whole thing is set up to produce worse software over time. It’s really really sad.
But they literally already did exactly that!
http://ismh.s3.amazonaws.com/snow-leopard-0-new-features.jpg
It is actually wrong. Mac OS X wasn't on an annual schedule until after Steve Jobs died. For a time, the schedule was more or less every two years, so there were some WWDCs when Jobs had little or nothing new to announce about it.
This software isn't in an "it would be cool to improve this" stage but something like "can it still be saved?" stage.