Apple and the Scalability of Secrecy 155
RobotsDinner writes "Anil Dash has a thoughtful exploration of Apple's notorious devotion to secrecy, and argues that not only is there a limit to its feasibility, but that recent events show Apple has reached that limit already. 'If the ethical argument is unpersuasive, then focus on the long-term viability of your marketing and branding efforts, and realize that a technology company that is determined to prevent information from being spread is an organization at war with itself. Civil wars are expensive, have no winners, and incur lots of casualties.'"
sometimes secrecy is necessary (Score:5, Insightful)
I happen to work in the game industry - there is a lot of secrecy in our industry too, by absolute necessity. Most games would get crucified if they got leaked to the press or the public too early in the dev cycle. Most people are not used to filling in the blanks - ignoring the rough edges, or even disregarding the aspects of an early product that just plain suck. That's all part of the development process, but consumers are used to seeing just the slick, final product (well, even that's not guaranteed nowadays unfortunately).
There's also some other very good reasons not to go blathering on about features that haven't even been developed yet: those features might get cut for budgetary, creative, or technical reasons, and then you look like an ass for not delivering on what you promised.
I'm not defending Apple's business practices necessarily, but I'm just saying that throwing your doors open to the press and public isn't the panacea that this guys is making it out to be.
Re:I PREDICT (Score:3, Insightful)
FCC: 1. Why did Apple reject the Google Voice application for iPhone and remove related third-party applications from its App Store?
Apple: Because they didn't meet our standards for iPhone applications.
FCC: 6. What are the standards for considering and approving iPhone applications?
Apple: We do what the hell we want.
seems kind of stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
The article seems kind of stupid. For example, he dismisses the motive of withholding information from competitors who might want to create rush knock-offs on the grounds that "no amount of secrecy will stop it." This is a like arguing that nobody should lock their doors, because houses get burgled anyway, and no amount of locks will stop it. He argues that copying is "a normal part of the business cycle," begging the question of whether it is beneficial to the company that is copied--and ignores the fact that trade secrets are also a normal part of business. He implies that Apple might somehow be culpable in the suicide of an employee, even though there is no evidence whatsoever that Apple drove him to suicide, and the apparent motive (to the extent that anything is known)--failing in one's responsibility--can be and has been a motive for suicide in many contexts that do not necessarily involve secrecy.
Even if there are some valid grounds for criticizing Apple's policies (and it is hard to defend some of their litigious actions), the obvious bias behind such obviously fallacious arguments undermines the case
Re:sometimes secrecy is necessary (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, if you want your hardware to look nice, it needs to have less openings, less buttons. If you want it to work all of the time, you have to take out the ability for human error. Apple gets this, and because of that people get apple products.
Don't get get me wrong - Linux is what I do for a job. I'd still be hard pressed to be recommending it to anyone who didn't know what they were doing, because there's far too many things they could mess with that would break it.
Re:sometimes secrecy is necessary (Score:5, Insightful)
Because attempting to overwrite an entire partition with an mp3 file makes perfect sense.
Re:sometimes secrecy is necessary (Score:1, Insightful)
There is a big difference between video games, movies, music, all "one way" media, and a company that creates products others have to use as a base for other things. Meaning, people need to know what is going on with Apple products because they build business' around using their products as a distribution medium - Mac, iPhone, iTunes, whatever.
People more or less only consume video games, they do not base their companies on being able to work with a video game - I don't think you analogy works in the slightest.
Re:sometimes secrecy is necessary (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. Apple is no different than game developers justifying its secrecy. This isn't about AAPL's technology. We already know what they use for technology ever since Steve left NeXT and turned AAPL into a BSD Unix shop.
It's all about their marketing arm. Their entire branding is all about total ease of use from every angle from hardware to software and the sleek, elegant design. This is not like MSFT where the entire industry cuts them slack for turning out a totally unfinished, buggy or otherwise complete failure (WindowsME, Vista).
Apple's clique in life has always been young, urban, chic, sexy. Anything that peels away all that makeup and reveals the sausage underneath is seen in Cuptertino as a potential catastrophe to Apple's public image.
Microsoft's culture never painted itself into a corner this way. Bless their hearts, they're still plugging away at the Zune.
Re:sometimes secrecy is necessary (Score:5, Insightful)
"after trying to cp *.mp3 /dev/sdb1"
Let me tell you about a little tool called "mount."
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
You can keep secrets (Score:5, Insightful)
So, this is bullshit. You can keep secrets as long as the people involved think secrecy is warranted.
Google have an astonishing track record of not leaking projects to the press. They've worked on some incredible stuff, and the vast majority don't get leaked at all, or get leaked accidentally. Huge numbers of internal/infrastructure projects never get told about outside the company. Sure, some projects are pre-announced because by working with outside companies they assume there will be leaks (ChromeOS, Android).
Internally people get told "Please don't leak unannounced projects. A leak could cause your co-workers to have to launch an unfinished or unpolished project ahead of time, reducing the impact of months or years of their time".
The problem with Apple is that they work with a lot of outside agents, all of whom can leak without thinking of the personal consequences to friends, just financial/legal ones (which can be avoided). Their own engineers have a pretty good track record of keeping quiet about 'important' things.
Re:sometimes secrecy is necessary (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Civil War? Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
What if people simply do not care about sharing what the "next big thing" happening at Apple is.
Then there shouldn't be appleinsider and macrumours and macnn and theunofficialappleweblog and fakestevejobs and all those sites, right?
Re:You can keep secrets (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:This article misses the point that (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. Name one tech company that gets the same amount of press. Name one tech company whose press events are always packed. Name one tech company whose press events and keynote speeches are ALWAYS liveblogged.
That's advertising too, and it seems to be working.
Re:The art of war... (Score:3, Insightful)
I see English words that I recognise, but I can't actually understand what this post is saying.
Re:I bought an ipod touch today, it's going back. (Score:3, Insightful)
Same here, I have a mac at work, but I run linux at home. So today, to get the iphone SMS patch, I had to sync at work. I'm lucky I heard about the patch before I left work, otherwise I would've had to go all weekend with a vulnerable iphone.
Re:I bought an ipod touch today, it's going back. (Score:3, Insightful)
wow your an idiot.
The apple touch pad supports not only scrolling but multiple mouse clicks, and right click all through ONE button pad.
MSFT is the master of marketing. apple uses secrecy so that when a product doesn't have a certain feature(like WinFS in Vista ) they don't get bad press for years afterwards.
Apple's biggest reason for secrecy is so they don't let down fans with a product that can't pass QA at the last minute. MSFT and Dell will both ship products that fail last minute QA and "fix" them later.
Apple doesn't want to Osborne itself to death (Score:4, Insightful)
the radio silence that precedes a little tweak in hardware specs is pretty stupid.
Is it stupid, or is it Apple trying not to Osborne itself to death [wikipedia.org]?
Re:sometimes secrecy is necessary (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:sometimes secrecy is necessary (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a tradeoff, but I for one prefer having a laptop with 5+ hour battery life or a phone that can go 3 days without charging to saving $100 when I do replace the battery in 3 years. If you don't like it, buy another product.
That's actually a great suggestion. My previous non-Apple phone could go 4 days without charging, and I replaced the battery myself in 10 seconds for $15. My non-Apple laptop runs for 6.5 hours on a user-serviceable battery. Apple's not going to change this as long as they make more money on non-user-serviceable parts--why should they? And can one really blame them?
When you buy an iPhone, for example, you can buy an extended warranty for $70 that covers the battery replacement.
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)
Gee, you must be a self made billionaire with all this business insight you have. Apple doesn't look for market share. A lot of companies such as Honda and BMW, don't. Others, like GM and Toyota do seek to maximize market share. Would you rather invest in GM or Honda? Apple looks to maximize its ROI and that in part means sustaining relatively high margins. They've been wildly successful at doing that since Jobs returned. If Apple played the same game as Dell or Microsoft, they'd not be as successful as they are. They'd be another Dell or Microsoft or they'd be out of business.
As to what is "good for the consumers". That's not what major corporations are about. Their job is to maximize profits/shareholder value. There are many strategies for accomplishing that. Microsoft and Dell have theirs and Apple has its. Doing what is "good for consumers" is sometimes a byproduct, but that is not their primary goal. It's the market and the "invisible hand" that are supposed to deliver an end result that is "good for the consumers".
Business and markets are not about morality or altruism. They are about return on investment. The theory is that this will end up being good for "everyone" and sometimes it works out that way, but it's not the responsibility of the participating concerns to forego their own economic self-interests in order to accomplish that.
Re:sometimes secrecy is necessary (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I bought an ipod touch today, it's going back. (Score:4, Insightful)
Congratulations - you managed to link a bunch of applications that support every iPod with the exception of the iPod Touch, i.e. the one the commenter was trying to use. Nice going.
Re:sometimes secrecy is necessary (Score:3, Insightful)
And you know this how?
Because I've been developing video games for over a decade, and I'm well aware of the reactions people have to seeing unfinished games, having seen it many, many times.
Id software was great for putting out "Technology previews" which crashed a lot, but sure built sales.
If you produce crap, and people can see its crap, they tend to step around it like a dog-pile on the pavement.
But a good concept demonstrator with wide appeal, even if rough around the edges, will draw customers like flies.
id's "technology previews" are relatively polished pieces of code, despite crashes (crashes are just indicative of beta code, nothing more). I'm talking more about pre-alpha stuff, very early in development.
Let me give you a real-life example: I'm currently working on *insert name of popular game* version 2. We have millions of fans of version 1 of the game, who are eagerly awaiting the next iteration. After about a year of development, all we had to visually show for our work looked like a *massive* step backwards. This was because we were putting in a lot of our work into low-level infrastructure and new tools development.
What would fans have thought, after a year of development, if they had seen a leaked copy of the new "game" that looked and played much worse than the original? It's hard to explain to the lay-person how the process works - how you sometimes have to tear a lot away and start rebuilding core technology, etc. Frankly, there was nothing interesting to see there anyhow.
I'm not arguing against openness in general for companies, but there are plenty of cases where you just don't have anything interesting to show the public. In cases like that, it seems like it would do more harm than good to show products off when they're not looking as good as they could.
Re:sometimes secrecy is necessary (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I've found that if you just hand someone an iPod, the fact that the circle on the front is actually a control you use by running your fingers across it isn't exactly intuitive to many people who have never seen one before. The old ones with the click wheel is actually a lot better in this regard.