The obstacle is that it'd probably reveal too much about Apple's secret sauce, or at least there's a perception that it would. People usually cite all kinds of

The obstacle is that it'd probably reveal too much about Apple's secret sauce, or at least there's a perception that it would. People usually cite all kinds of general reasons why Apple is thriving - product design, emotional marketing, vertical integration - while ignoring the unsexy foundation that makes all of that possible: hiring the best people and setting them up in highly interdisciplinary teams. And any edge there is going to be kept under wraps, especially since competitors like Google are doing it wrong - I've heard of how siloed the designers are there, just like at Yahoo or Microsoft. That's the real reason Google's products look flat and overengineered - their designers hop from team to team like little bees, they're not a core part of the culture.