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How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday March 19, @11:34AM
from the this-dept-line-for-rent dept.
from the this-dept-line-for-rent dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Wired has a look at how the good and bad of Apple, their Yin and Yang, have come together to form a company that actually works. The piece looks at Steve Jobs' unusual and abrasive management style, otherwise known as 'Management Techniques From the Dark Side'. It's essentially a list of counterintuitive, suspicious-seeming and downright evil management techniques that work - for them."
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Firehose:How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything by Anonymous Coward
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
What a silly article (Score:5, Insightful)
The author tries to come up with ways that Apple is evil, but really winds up taking jabs primarily at Steve Jobs. As a newfound mac user, I don't give a crap about Jobs, I care about using a computer that matches my needs and does what I want. For me that's Mac. And for most of the other 6-7% of the Mac marketshare it's a pretty similar situation.
Re:What a silly article (Score:5, Interesting)
My favorite bit from skimming it: "even WIRED got it wrong" (referring to telling Apple to get out of the hardware business).
This from the magazine whose cover story was "The Long Boom" the month that the internet bubble burst.
Wired hardly ever gets anything right (not entirely its fault, since it makes lots of predictions), but still.
Re:What a silly article - Mod Parent Up (Score:5, Interesting)
I also noticed that the people bitching about Jobs were "former" employees. Well holy shit...someone who left or was fired is going to bitch about their former boss for some media facetime? This is a 5 page article?!
And maybe I didn't read enough, but "micromanaging" has nothing to do with demanding exacting detail from the output. Anyone who calls that micromanaging has NEVER been micromanaged and its an insult to anyone who has suffered through a real micromanaging boss.
completely ignorant (Score:5, Interesting)
The author seems blissfully unaware of Apple's free software use. GCC, Darwin, Khtml and what not punch a few large holes in their central thesis.
Re:completely ignorant (Score:5, Informative)
Re:completely ignorant (Score:5, Interesting)
KHTML, Cups, etc all fall into that category. While Apple routinely publishes it's open source code back as it is required under the GPL, the software that is BSD based doesn't get published as often. Where is the Darwin version for the iPhone? If it really is running a custom version of OSX then it exists, but you will never see it.
Meh. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to call that "Evil" I suppose you can. I think, however, that design by committee only produces piles of steaming crap. There is definitely something to be said for a guy who has vision, and the force of personality to see it through.
Re:well, it is silly, but not in the way you think (Score:5, Interesting)
Another company that used to work that way was Palm. Their flagship pilot was built to be something that the CEO would to carry around with him. There is a well-known story about him getting a block of wood cut which would fit in his jacket pocket and giving it to the designers as a maximum size for the device.
Re:What a silly article (Score:5, Funny)
Partnering with Microsoft is the kiss of death. Period. Microsoft will do legal & illegal things to fuck you, and then worry about the consequences later.
Apple doesn't do this; so even though Apple is a brutish sort of company, they're easier to do business with. Lawful Evil > Chaotic Evil
Its not hard - most managers are tools (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Its not hard - most managers are tools (Score:5, Funny)
Hey! I resent that. And I can prove it's not true. I've got a 70-page presentation that I'd like to share. I'll read through every single slide and, to keep you interested, it's got all kinds of text that flies in from the left and fades out and
He needs to get towed a few times. (Score:5, Insightful)
Jobs needs to make a few trips to the impound lot to bail out his car. He would probably create his own reserved parking place, but at least that would put an end to the myth of the egalitarian parking lot policy.
Re:He needs to get towed a few times. (Score:5, Insightful)
To Steve Jobs, the hundred dollar fine he'd pay here for parking in a handicapped spot is akin to my putting a quarter in a parking meter. Chump change not worth worrying about.
Fines should be based on net worth, or at least income. Since they're not, the richer you are the less the law applies to you.
Re:He needs to get towed a few times. (Score:5, Informative)
He can indeed park in the front entrance, on the sidewalk, or on the front lawn. But, he can't park in a handicapped space unless he is handicapped. That's the law.
The law also requires a certain number of handicapped spaces. The formula varies by state -- maybe someone knows the details of CA law, as it would apply to Apple. So, Jobs couldn't just convert a handicapped space to his personal parking space, unless they are currently exceeding the requirements of the law.
Re:He needs to get towed a few times. (Score:5, Insightful)
They Be The Opposite (Score:5, Insightful)
With that said, Apple helps keep Microsoft out of even more legal hot water, for example, by directly backing Apple. It's a CYA tactic on the legal front.
Bottom line: Don't just drink the Kool-Aid on the Apple story without taking 1-2 steps back to look at the marketplace, cultures, and end users.
Re:They Be The Opposite (Score:5, Funny)
Apple has pulled their share of disasters as well, but when you look at Apple's competition, their products are often mind-numbingly BAD. VISTA? Earlier online music purchasing systems? Dell and Gateway computers?
Apple isn't all that great, it's just that the competition sucks. I mean when the Asus eee-pc is the most encouraging thing you've seen come to the tech table in awhile...
Evil Works (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole point in allowing many different people to tackle a problem is to eliminate single-point-of-failure. If one company's product blows, we can choose another's. This is very important, both to the consumer, and to the market as a whole.
But when one company is the best at what they do, people stop thinking about choice. If apple makes the best mp3player/music store, why go anywhere else? If their operating system is so good, who cares if it only runs on their hardware... as long as their hardware is great, too?
Unfortunately, even evil geniuses sometimes fail. For instance, the iPhone SDK... I honestly don't see that going anywhere, unless the current license agreement is modified to something less draconian.
Re:Evil Works (Score:5, Insightful)
that it can work for anyone else. It also may not work for any other
company. It happens to work for Jobs and Apple (apparently).
On a similar note, there are plenty of people that are "google wannabes".
They will pick up on something they've heard about Google's management
style. They will try to implement it and be full of themselves. It ends
up being a big fiasco of course because such people are just kidding
themselves. They don't have the talent to be managers at Google or
Apple.
Better Link (IMHO) (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-04/bz_apple?currentPage=all [wired.com]
So much better than flipping, flipping, flipping through pages and waiting for reloads. It's the print version, so you can use it that way too -- long article so print and read offline.
* = Assumes you plan on actually reading the article.
Differences with Google are oversold (Score:5, Insightful)
To be a large, public, consumer company you have to keep some things secret for a variety of reasons. You don't want to telegraph strategy to your competitors. You want to release things with a splash to earn unpaid media coverage. You don't want to be held legally liable for stock price movements based on R&D projects that might never get released. etc.
Apple is very closed and secretive about some things, but quite open about others. Like Google their core OS kernel is open source. Like Google they employ commonly available technologies--http, MP3, H264, AAC, Unix, USB, ATA, 802.11, etc.--but put them together in unique ways to create new products.
Leadership, not totalitarianism (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not a fan of Apple, nor of Mr. Jobs, but he has some serious leadership skills. The fact that he's also a dick is not a factor in his success. Apparently his leadership can outshine his dickishness.
Fortunately Mr. Jobs decided to start a computer company instead of a religious cult in Guyana. Who knows what Jim Jones' "Kool-Ade OS" might have been like had he chosen a different path.
Been there (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Handicapped (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Handicapped (Score:5, Funny)