Apple Planning To Build Private Restaurant 234
First time accepted submitter a90Tj2P7 writes "Apple is building a 21,468 square foot private restaurant in Cupertino so employees can talk shop over lunch without being overheard. Apple's director of real estate facilities, Dan Wisenhunt, stated that: 'We like to provide a level of security so that people and employees can feel comfortable talking about their business, their research and whatever project they're engineering without fear of competition sort of overhearing their conversations.'"
Xerox - "damn, why didnt we think of that" (Score:5, Insightful)
Adele Goldberg -- "actually, i did think of that, and told you guys, but you ignored me"
Consumer - "and that democratization of information between Xerox, Apple, and Microsoft brought technology to the masses and created the computer revolution of the 80s and 90s"
Apple CEO - "and we cant have that again, because the 80s and 90s were brutal for the entrenched interests. like Xerox"
Google - "no shit. thats why you shouldnt base your fucking business model on making information secret, when your entire history has been based on borrowing ideas from other people"
Next up... (Score:5, Insightful)
employee dorms to prevent honey trap operations.
What's new? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've worked for big companies, and for startups. I have to say that on-campus dining facilities are pretty standard for big companies. We normally call them "cafeterias" but if you want to call it a restaurant knock yourself out.
Not to mention that Google's in-house chefs are a thing of legend. I really don't see what's news here.
Re:Xerox - "damn, why didnt we think of that" (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd rather have companies "stealing" information from each others (maybeee apple)
Rather than megacorporation systematically stockpiling private information from the whole planet population (Google Dark Empire of Doom)
Re:Xerox - "damn, why didnt we think of that" (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that all of google's algorithms that their business depends on are secret
Maybe google should release all their secrets as well?
Re:Xerox - "damn, why didnt we think of that" (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny, considering the algorithm most important to them - PageRank - is described publicly in a patent [uspto.gov]. Not to mention that it doesn't even belong to Google, but to Stanford University (since it was developed by Page and Brin as a research project).
Re:Sounds like self-aggrandization (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, yes. Blind loyalty and marketing. This explains why approaching 50% of their customers have never owned an Apple product before. Why they have the largest digital music download store, the best selling digital music player, the best selling cell phone, the highest customer satisfaction rating, and the best profit margins in the industry.
Whatever kool-aid you're drinking is working.
Re:Cafeteria (Score:2, Insightful)
Only a slashtard is arrogant enough to call Apple arrogant for calling it a private restaurant when the only source to use that term was friggin' CNet. It's an addition to the Apple campus containing a cafeteria, lounge, and meeting rooms.
Re:What's new? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like self-aggrandization (Score:5, Insightful)
"Doing it better" in business means more profitably or at least with better margins. Which company is "doing it better than Apple"?
Re:Sounds like self-aggrandization (Score:4, Insightful)
You've listed one of the very important parts to producing a successful product and/or service, yes. Well done.
Putting Apple's success *entirely* on "marketing and blind loyalty" is one of the biggest reasons Apple does so well while others flounder. It's very easy to dismiss their success out of hand without understanding what it is they do so well.
If it really is "so easy" and that "any company could do what they do" (as the original AC post claimed) then... why aren't they? The goal of a company is to make money. If what Apple is doing is so easy then surely there should be lots of companies rolling in cash?
I'm honestly curious. If it's all 100% marketing, why isn't anyone else doing it? Surely other companies can hire marketing people too, right?
Re:Sounds like self-aggrandization (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Apple's marketing people are the best in the consumer electronics industry.
2. Their top management always knew that they were a CONSUMER electronics company. Not a computer company that also made some accessories. Not a technology company or a software company, although they were really good at those things too.
Apple's phone doesn't employ much more advanced tech than high-end Android phones.
Apple's music store doesn't employ any technology that its competitors don't have.
There's nothing unusually compelling about their music players -- any more.
Their distinction is that they got there first.
There are two aspects of marketing where Apple really excelled. The first is conventional marketing: push, push, push that product. The second (which is really the first) is that Apple, unlike its competition, wasn't afraid to go out and create a market where one didn't exist. That's always been part of Apple's business model. It started with the Apple computer. They were the first company to really market computers to home users. They didn't INVENT computers or even computers that could have been sold directly to consumers. They were just the first to ignore their fear that the market wouldn't accept them.
Apple was right out front with the digital music players and a digital music store. Then they were the first to bring music to phones. It's not like nobody had thought of this before. It was all being discussed in electronics companies across the the USA and Japan. Lots of engineers had great ideas for how this would work. They all knew how these things could be done. But at these other companies management wasn't interested in taking a risk on introducing a new category of consumer product. Apple was all about that risk.
Steve Jobs, specifically, wanted to be first because he knew how much being first was worth.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like self-aggrandization (Score:5, Insightful)
They never got there first. There were other computers, tablets, other music players, other music stores, other phones with music. You're talking out your ass.
Apple has excellent marketing, yes. Microsoft spends tons on marketing too, but theirs sucks.
What Apple did was to make tech delightful. Simple and elegant. They ditched floppies first. They made it really easy to buy music and put it on a portable device and make playlists without a tutorial. They did something unprecedented when they made the iPhone-- at home activation. I was waiting in line on release day (for the mother-in-law) a hundred people or so from the from the front, yet I walked out with two iPhones 45 minutes after they opened the doors. (then I wisely waited two days before attempting to activate). For the first time, using a web browser on a phone was fun instead of a disappointment.
Look at the consumer section of Dell's on-line store. Look at Apple's on-line store. Now which one is more scary to a non-technical person looking for a personal laptop? Do they want the Intel Core i3, the 2nd Gen Intel Core i3, the 2nd Gen Intel Core i5, the... Do they want IKEA laptop covers? Or do they instead want something that "Handles daily tasks with ease" but is rated 3/5 stars.
The Jukebox 6000, and its successor the Jukebox Studio (see below), used standard USB 1.1 technology, transferring data at a maximum rate of 1 MB per second. These models transfer data at a comparably slow rate compared with succeeding Archos devices using the USB 2.0 standard.
Regarding the popular predecessor to the iPod line, the Archos Jukebox, Wikipedia has this to say:
This device was released Saturday, December 9, 2000 and discontinued as of Friday, May 16, 2003. It weighs 350 g.
The Jukebox is historically notable for shipping with a user interface and operating system so unfriendly and bug-ridden as to inspire Björn Stenberg and other programmers to begin to develop a superior, free and open-source replacement operating system. This project became Rockbox.[citation needed]
Apple isn't so much about making "new categories of consumer product" as they are about finding broken categories of overly complex and unsatisfactory products and re-imagining them as delightful products. I've supported family on Windows and on Macs.. once they get Macs, they don't call me even 1/10th as much for support issues.