Lately, I’ve been seeing many people express their main problem with OS X. It’s all been pretty much the same: Fix The Frickin’ Finder. Not being a Mac user myself, I wouldn’t know how bad it is, but I do want to make one comment. You’re only doing half of what needs to be done to get these changes done.

For those of you that forgot, Apple is a company, just like any other. Their main aim is to make money. They do this by creating products that they can sell for more money than it cost to make it. The saying that applies to almost all other companies applies to Apple as well: Money talks. Money talks louder than the entire blogosphere combined. If something in their products is causing people to choose alternatives, and therefore Apple makes less money, they will make it their priority to fix the problem because it is costing them money.

The Finder is almost at that status. The one problem is that for all the whining and complaining people do, I have never once seen someone actually say “If the Finder is not fixed in Leopard, I’m not buying it.” Now I know that people will say, “But there are so many other features, it would be stupid to pass it up just because the Finder is problematic,” Which is why it’s not getting fixed. This is what is causing Apple to think “The Finder isn’t perfect, but because it’s not a big enough problem to cost us money, we won’t make it a priority.”

Even before that, you’d usually see developers creating replacement programs that fix the problems, which can be a big red flag to a company. This is nothing I’ve seen with the Finder. It’s not even a big enough problem for the general user base that some people will try and fix it themselves.

This is what happened with Internet Explorer. People wanted the problems fixed so bad that they either made popular pages that broke in IE, or made alternative browsers. Since IE isn’t sold for profit, when MS saw that IE was losing marketshare, they said, “We need to fix IE ASAP.” Right now, we’re well on our way to having an Internet Explorer with better standards compliance.

All I’m trying to say, is that those people who want big changes to the Finder should either use alternatives, or get used to only seeing minor improvements. The collective consuming population has the ability to manipulate companies, but screaming and yelling won’t get it done in any reasonable time frame. You need to make Apple say “we’re losing money because the Finder has problems and people won’t buy OS X. We need to fix it ASAP.”

Who knows? Maybe Apple will fix it before you have a chance to make them lose money. From what I hear, Apple is just the kind of company that would do something like that.