4 ms·
Looking in from the outside, I would hazard a guess that Microsoft is more Balkanized than Apple; there are many more products and the successful ones have been
by jfb 15y ago
Looking in from the outside, I would hazard a guess that Microsoft is more Balkanized than Apple; there are many more products and the successful ones have been around for quite a while, allowing groups to pick up political capital that just isn't available, or rather, is expended differently at Apple.
- danudey 15y agoI've heard a lot of stories of politicking at Microsoft (e.g. the Office project manager didn't want to implement handwriting recognition to add support for tablets, which hurt MS's early tablet OSes). I compare that to Apple, which seems to have a top-down vision, from which all project behaviours and priorities descend. Lion's adding support for auto-save? You'd better believe that implementing auto-save support into iWork is a top priority, regardless of what the iWork PM thinks about it. That said, Apple seems to rarely hire people who don't share the same vision, and with that comes a certain uniformity of direction that tends to reduce inter-project scuffles. Also, I get the sense that if (for example) the project manager for iWork was causing unnecessary friction with other teams instead of working with them towards a common goal, he'd be replaced with someone else who's more of a team player.