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How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong
An anonymous reader writes "Wired has a look at how the good and bad of Apple, their Yin and Yang, have come together to form a company that actually works. The piece looks at Steve Jobs' unusual and abrasive management style, otherwise known as 'Management Techniques From the Dark Side'. It's essentially a list of counterintuitive, suspicious-seeming and downright evil management techniques that work - for them."
Given that most managerial types are ignorant tools whose rise to power is typically fuelled by a mediocre knowledge of PowerPoint and Project, its a no brainer that to succeed, be agile, and come up with good products, you simply do everything that 'traditional' techniques says to avoid.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Agreed.
My favorite bit from skimming it: "even WIRED got it wrong" (referring to telling Apple to get out of the hardware business).
This from the magazine whose cover story was "The Long Boom" the month that the internet bubble burst.
Wired hardly ever gets anything right (not entirely its fault, since it makes lots of predictions), but still.
No joke, I wish my mod points hadn't expired. This really is some twisted shit. This seems par for the course lately from Wired. They have been publishing absolute garbage lately. Air Force blocks blocks and other sites and suddenlty something that is an industry best practice for security becomes censorship?
I also noticed that the people bitching about Jobs were "former" employees. Well holy shit...someone who left or was fired is going to bitch about their former boss for some media facetime? This is a 5 page article?!
And maybe I didn't read enough, but "micromanaging" has nothing to do with demanding exacting detail from the output. Anyone who calls that micromanaging has NEVER been micromanaged and its an insult to anyone who has suffered through a real micromanaging boss.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
The author seems blissfully unaware of Apple's free software use. GCC, Darwin, Khtml and what not punch a few large holes in their central thesis.
Another company that used to work that way was Palm. Their flagship pilot was built to be something that the CEO would to carry around with him. There is a well-known story about him getting a block of wood cut which would fit in his jacket pocket and giving it to the designers as a maximum size for the device.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I've worked for an Apple supplier, and it's a bit creepy to have someone take mug shot of you because "Mr. Jobs wants to know what you look like." Not as creepy as getting a phone call at home late at night because they want hand-holding, but creepy.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I don't use the word "organic" because you can't explain what it means. But everyone understands SMOOTH! I use a 24" iMac in a Windows office. People come to me for tasks, and I perform them before their eyes using tools which make it look SMOOTH. It makes me look like I'm magic(al). Exposé, Spaces, Stacks, CoverFlow all make the same tasks that Windows does look SMOOTH. I also run Parallels for IE6 testing, RDC to reach my server, and if I get wicked, I BOOT CAMP into VISTA!!!
Plus I have a machine that is running the same chips and the same apps (Word, InDesign, PShop) as they are, and it's smoother, faster, quieter, larger, thermally cooler and looks great dominating my desk. Take a look at Dell's "The One" and see precisely why Apple succeeded.
The CEO who forced Jobs out wrote an autobiography and mentioned all of the mistakes Jobs wanted to make, how they were such terrible ideas. Jobs gets back into the company years later and does those very things and now Apple is an immense success again. It amazes me how sound logic and reason can sometimes be so wrong. "Stick to the knitting" is usually good advice because businesses typically go to shit when they try to expand into markets they know nothing about and refuse to hire people who do know the market to manage those divisions. My last died doing the same kind of stuff, the boss has a dozen side projects on his plate and he's ignoring the business' main money-making division.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Quite possibly the reason only former employees ever comment is because the current ones are terrified of their boss.
I disagree. Industrial design is a big part of it, and not so much technology as engineering. People don't go for OSX because it's BSD, they go for it because it's pretty, and because shit just works. The latter sounds simple, but is extremely hard to pull off-- it requires total vertical control, and the willingness in upper management to enforce a high standard. BSD was just one of the possible ways to meet this high standard, that Apple felt was best.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Yes, pretty is a part of it, but "because shit just works" is a far greater part of the equation for most people, in my experience.
And to whom do people turn, when they're considering getting a new computer and they want to know which particular brand of shit just works the best? The same kind people who switched to Macs in droves a few years back, solely because of OS X. Such solicited recommendations have been the driving force behind Mac sales among most of my friends.
Well, yes and no: Apple is more a hardware packager than maker, since it now just takes utterly standard components and puts them together. At one point it used unusual chips, had its own peripheral standard, etc., so Apple has taken many of the suggestions from others and conformed itself more to standard PCs.
In addition, it's not clear whether Apple would be even more successful if it licensed its operating system to other companies willing to make less expensive boxes.
allowing mp3 on the iPod, and then lock you into the formats they want you to like
Near as I can tell, after using iTunes since 2002 and an iPod since 2005, there is no such thing as lock-in on the platform. The only pain I've ever felt was using up machine authorizations on stuff bought from the iTunes store, and I quickly fixed that problem by freely stopping my purchases and freely taking my business somewhere else. Later Apple themselves fixed that problem by offering DRM-free material, which is great, but my buying habits have migrated elsewhere and there's no punishment from Apple.
The iTunes store certainly encourages purchase of a large class of their material in a locked format. But there's no punishment for operating outside of that, and it's really not even particularly difficult to unlock the DRM'd stuff.
Tweet, tweet.
I have recently switched to Leopard and Xtools was on the disk. If you want to use KDE etc. you can. Once you have MacPorts running you can use most Gnu stuff. I think that MacPorts is better than Fink for getting all the Gnu stuff running but that is because I prefer an easy life.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.