I personally think near-daily updating to fix bugs that should've been discovered and fixed before actually shipping product is absurd. It's been argued that this is because systems are more complex now, but maybe we don't actually need all that complexity...
I keep using the product/service if it's stable. I have no use for a service with loads of nice features that don't work.
I really wish Microsoft had stayed the course and maintained separate desktop and mobile operating systems. Windows CE had problems, but they could have fixed that without messing with Windows.
I have a cheap Win8 tablet. It's weird. Quite slick in a lot of ways, but you can go back to the old UI and see where all the bodges are.
Mac is a much more viable choice today than in the past, and I think the Mac's slowly but steadily increasing market share has something to do with the perceived reliability and stability of the platform.
I'm only basing this off of personal experience. I have Windows at work and Mac at home.
Thankfully, OS X is cheap/free. I use OS X, Windows, and Arch literally every day of my life, both at work and home.
To be quite honest, I blame consumers for all this non-sense. No one wants to actually pay for software. I can go into this in a more nuanced fashion, but I seriously think software across the board is a good bit cheaper than it needs to be. From OS's to games and everything in between.
The problem is that Windows isn't a purely enterprise product. Although it gets little money from the end user market, it needs dominance on that market for strategic reasons. So, MS will ensure it dominates end user market, whatever it takes.
From a customer perpective, it looks like an evil spiral more and more companies tend to fall into.
Edit: wording
So much focus on "getting there quickly." A few keystrokes and a marketing page, and everyone's using "Foo.js" v0.0.1.
And then you're spending time as a developer dealing with deprecations because APis changed.
But as painful as that is, I believe we need external feedback to deliver better software. Trying a thing, seeing how it's used, and improving it is a good way to go.
It is just going to result in bad times in the short term.
Apple can't fix this until the next update, yet it's a problem in Safari. Now we have to wait till the next update to fix a pretty bad problem.
You can see this, incidentally, if you browse to Libreoffice's opengrok.
