4 ms·

Oh My God! Apple Killed ThinkSecret! Those Bastards!

15 points by terpua 19y ago

inovica 19y ago
I think that if Apple wants to keep its products secret then they should be allowed to do whatever they can to do this. I must admit to wondering if they have 'used' this system in the past to pre-test market reaction to potential products as well as to provide them within another avenue of publicity. The problem is that false rumors surface and I think this can damage Apple. Just my own thoughts of course, but I don't think that this is a bad thing
henning 19y ago
I don't like Apple's secrecy fetish. It reminds me of Dick Cheney. I hate it when Robert Scoble is right, but Apple really needs to open up with respect to things like blogging. Channel 9 made Microsoft, of all companies, feel a lot more human and a lot less evil. I realize this is incompatible with the Mac cult and "one more thing" Stevenote surprises.
- staunch 19y ago
  I think it's going a bit far to compare Cheney and Jobs. One is an elected official subject to the transparency of a democracy and who costs lives and billions of dollars when he lies. The other is the CEO of a commercial enterprise who's a control freak and occasionally gets a little nasty with people who leak news about his gadgets.
shayan 19y ago
I am happy that apple wasn't able to or didn't try hard enough to find the informer
mattmaroon 19y ago
They sure seem to be floundering in the good will department these days.
pg 19y ago
Though I'm an Apple fan, it bothers me the way they seem to skate just along the border of evil. Can you imagine Google shutting down a Google rumors site? Theory: Steve Jobs is overreaching to the point of evil, but he's also smart enough to hire hackers who are more than yes-men, and they push back when he wants to do something too bad. I suppose this is ultimately what keeps Google honest too. If so, then being good and hiring smart hackers are inseparable; and that means as companies increasingly can't win without smart hackers, they'll have to become increasingly good. (By "become" here I mean in the sense that populations become a certain way through evolution. I'm not proposing any given company will get nicer. Just that good companies will increasingly triumph over evil ones.)
- ecuzzillo 19y ago
  Most accounts I've heard say that Microsoft was the place to be in the early 90's, and many smart people wanted to work there, particularly ones coming out of college, and Microsoft software was crap because executive decisions and backward compatibility made it crap, not because their hackers were crap. People who read the Windows 2000 source leak said that it was fairly uniformly well-written code, whose comments indicated that its authors knew they were making everything ugly and klugey, but couldn't do much about it and preserve compatibility. So I somewhat doubt that good employee hackers can steer a fundamentally really evil main guy away from being evil.

15 points by terpua 19y ago

I think that if Apple wants to keep its products secret then they should be allowed to do whatever they can to do this. I must admit to wondering if they have 'used' this system in the past to pre-test market reaction to potential products as well as to provide them within another avenue of publicity. The problem is that false rumors surface and I think this can damage Apple. Just my own thoughts of course, but I don't think that this is a bad thing

henning 19y ago

I don't like Apple's secrecy fetish. It reminds me of Dick Cheney. I hate it when Robert Scoble is right, but Apple really needs to open up with respect to things like blogging. Channel 9 made Microsoft, of all companies, feel a lot more human and a lot less evil. I realize this is incompatible with the Mac cult and "one more thing" Stevenote surprises.

staunch 19y ago
I think it's going a bit far to compare Cheney and Jobs. One is an elected official subject to the transparency of a democracy and who costs lives and billions of dollars when he lies. The other is the CEO of a commercial enterprise who's a control freak and occasionally gets a little nasty with people who leak news about his gadgets.

shayan 19y ago

I am happy that apple wasn't able to or didn't try hard enough to find the informer

mattmaroon 19y ago

They sure seem to be floundering in the good will department these days.

pg 19y ago

Though I'm an Apple fan, it bothers me the way they seem to skate just along the border of evil. Can you imagine Google shutting down a Google rumors site? Theory: Steve Jobs is overreaching to the point of evil, but he's also smart enough to hire hackers who are more than yes-men, and they push back when he wants to do something too bad. I suppose this is ultimately what keeps Google honest too. If so, then being good and hiring smart hackers are inseparable; and that means as companies increasingly can't win without smart hackers, they'll have to become increasingly good. (By "become" here I mean in the sense that populations become a certain way through evolution. I'm not proposing any given company will get nicer. Just that good companies will increasingly triumph over evil ones.)

ecuzzillo 19y ago
Most accounts I've heard say that Microsoft was the place to be in the early 90's, and many smart people wanted to work there, particularly ones coming out of college, and Microsoft software was crap because executive decisions and backward compatibility made it crap, not because their hackers were crap. People who read the Windows 2000 source leak said that it was fairly uniformly well-written code, whose comments indicated that its authors knew they were making everything ugly and klugey, but couldn't do much about it and preserve compatibility. So I somewhat doubt that good employee hackers can steer a fundamentally really evil main guy away from being evil.