On: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

[xvector]

I worked at Apple for a couple years and it wasn't uncommon to see org level dysfunction.

But Siri is such a terrible product that it amazes me that the org hasn't been deleted, and that Siri hasn't been ripped out of products.

I have seen Apple delete bad orgs a couple times before so I find it strange they let Siri survive. It does not "have good bones," it is not a good product and it never will be.

It is actively frustrating to use and I deeply regret migrating to HomeKit as well, primarily because of the usage experience via Siri.

Truly a total/spectacular failure of an org and product. It ought to be a case study for how not to product manage.

[bonesss → xvector]

While this all falls under the same product umbrealla, I'm of the opinion that the intractable problems around Siri have more to do with the lack of nuance in the underlying APIs.

Starting a specific album at a specific song, for example... well Siri handles it, to a point, but it has to interface with Spotify, and there you hit a wall of hot garbage, along with the sequencing and process-management/integrity issues of integration software. Garbage meets a money fire, in other words. High cost, brittle, constantly changing, glue code that is mostly depending on third parties also requires session management? Not a winning product formula.

Sprinkle in some inhuman HCI nightmares like not pausing speech appropriately when reading an album title and you've got a recipe for an expensive turd that annoys your customers, oh my, by a lot.