And no, it isn’t because he’s a rabid Mac fan like me and not because his division just bought out Blake’s company. It’s because of this and this.

As to his comment:

I don’t know if Aperture is a “failure of architecture.” My belief that is that Aperture has some aggressive new UI and digital photo workflow models, but people demand (and Adobe’s surprise entrance into this market entails) more effort spent on RAW processing and application performance. This means a complete concentration on the model layer and performance enhancements or feature-pulling on the view layer.

It may be the aggressive new UI and workflow is a software design problem on the architectural level (UI code is typically a huge fraction of a codebase so it is highly possible—certainly you can’t jury-rig a new UI architecture without a complete rewrite), but I feel the Aperture team should be very proud of their accomplishments. They should remember that some of us “get it” and are impressed with it, even if it performs slowly on our systems, even if the architectural design is a mess.

I feverently hope the latter isn’t true.

If you carefully parse their statement, my guesses appear to be right. ThinkSecret was right about facts (disbanding much of the Aperture team), but wrong about the conclusions (Apple canning Aperture). In fact, it sounds to me that my guess about concentrating on Aperture’s image processing functions instead of the original UI advances sounds like the most likely scenario to explain both.

I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. On one hand, sometimes I take a great exception to some of the details in his posts (his Linus Torvalds quote in this article are wildly off-base—after all, it ignores the fact that FreeBSD actually outperforms Linux). On the other hand, I linked his famous “parlay” article in my post above to explain where I felt Apple’s Aperture strategy fit.