3 ms·
Apple is famously compartmentalised & secretive: People working on one product don't even get to go into the building where another product is being developed &
by pja 15y ago
Apple is famously compartmentalised & secretive: People working on one product don't even get to go into the building where another product is being developed & the employees working on new products are pretty much forbidden from discussing them outside of their own development team as I understand things.
I would imagine that this makes it very hard for managers of existing products to kill off internal competitors. So long as the board is happy to fund it, you can develop something new without having to play internal big company politics.
- Iroiso 15y agoThis makes a lot of sense. Compare this to MS where there is alot of internal politics and competition amongst products. Short and insightful article all in all.
- crististm 15y agoexcept for when they take their prototypes and loose them in bars
- lallysingh 15y agoFor the age of the company, their intelligence leak rate is pretty damn good.
- salem 15y agoIt's a slippery slope to have teams fire-walled and competing with each other. We hear stories from the Dropbox guys that One Apple team invited them over to ask how they hacked the finder, because they didn't have access to the functionality that dropbox reverse engineered. As a recent grad at Motorola, I once heard similar stories about Motorola's PCS and semiconductor groups 10 years ago.
- pja 15y agoAs I recall from interviews with the DropBox crowd, that's more because what DropBox was doing wasn't even planned functionality in the first place; they hooked into the Finder code at a fairly low level in order to get it to do what they wanted. (Anyone got a link?) Your general point is correct of course: the price of compartmentalisation is the inability to benefit from the experience of other groups in the company.