Having to deal with confidentiality and secrecy on a daily basis in my product design job one thing is immediately clear. If I am designing a widget which requ

Having to deal with confidentiality and secrecy on a daily basis in my product design job one thing is immediately clear. If I am designing a widget which requires a pin I need to talk to a supplier about the pin. Typically the supplier will ask me what the pin is for. I could tell him exactly about the product or a subset of the product functionality and that would give him a pretty good idea of what the pin needs to do and he and I could draw up the specification for the pin together. This is lazy and potentially shifts the design of the pin away from the desired design and more towards what is already possible (this is how suppliers tend to work - they need to use their existing machinery as it is less risky than developing new machinery and processes). This is not how iPhones and ultraslim lovely shiny Macbooks are developed. The uncertainty on the part of the designer allows the supplier to steer the discussion. If I've done my homework correctly and worked out what diameter the pin should be, material, hardness and the shape of the tip of the pin I could tell the supplier all of those things and he would be none the wiser about the product. He can still supply me with exactly what I need without him having to know about the rest of the product. This is a good outcome. If I don't know the diameter of the pin I should order 15 different diameter pins and test them all until I get the right one. What it means is, as a designer I need to own the process of finding out those parameters about the pin which means I am richer because I own that information and the process of discovery regardless of who is supplying me with pins. It also gives me the power to go to any pin supplier and get the same thing which also keeps my costs down. Double win (even if I've developed the new pin making process there should be nothing to stop me taking that process somewhere else as long as my contracts are in place before we start talking). Secrecy has many advantages as well as the surprise WWDC factor.