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."

Comments

Its not hard - most managers are tools

[Gothmolly]

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.

Re:What a silly article - Mod Parent Up

[db32]

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.

completely ignorant

[gnutoo]

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.

Re:completely ignorant

[Anonymous Coward]

"While Apple routinely publishes it's open source code back as it is required under the GPL, the software that is BSD based doesn't get published as often."

You seem blissfully unaware that the BSD gave them this right in the first place, and you should be so lucky to see them repost any of their work at all. The fact is, it works out better for Apple to submit patches because that's one less thing they have to keep track of inside of their own infrastructure. In a sense, they're becoming a software company that's modeled around how most major Linux distributions work today; take from the community, put a tiny spin on it, push it as their own. Anything to lessen their workload and let them put their effort on fixing their own self-made software.

This is why Apple submits to the LGPL and the GPL where applicable. It works very well for them because it's one less thing for them to have to worry about. Webkit would be KHTML: Qt-specific half-legible C++, unusable squaller to the greater community which now includes Google, Nokia, and several smaller software companies working on reintegrating it with GTK+ and Qt.

Microsoft also has taken a ton of code from the BSD community, including their original TCP/IP stack. Do you think you'll ever see Microsoft release any of that code? And furthermore, why do you care so much? They've got their own reasons for keeping their code closed (bug fixing, internal documentation, huge gaping unimplemented sections, etc.), they don't particularly care about anything else at this time.

They could do this very same thing with Linux if they wanted to, it would just have taken them much, much longer to get to market. Apple's playing book says "Get to market now, fix the bugs later." Whether or not you subscribe to the "with enough eyes, all bugs become shallow" law of software development, having thousands of developers come in and start asking hundreds of thousands of questions affects their ability to just Write The Damned Code.

Re:well, it is silly, but not in the way you think

[TheRaven64]

The main difference between Apple and other companies is who they design products for. Most companies try to identify a market segment, work out what people in that segment want to buy, and then produce a product for that market. Apple tries to produce products for Steve Jobs. He has fairly good taste and so often those are also products that other people want to buy. Sometimes, they are not. A classic example is the Cube - a computer everyone wanted but no one thought was worth the price (the down side of designing products for a multibillionaire). It remains to be seen whether the MacBook Air will fall into that category.

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.

Re:What a silly article - Mod Parent Up

[realisticradical]

There was a pretty good fortune article a while back called The trouble with Steve about Jobs. The basic commentary seemed to be, "Jobs is a really demanding man to work for but some of my best work came from that relationship." I don't see any reason why I can't like Apple's products and also be happy that I don't work there.

Quite possibly the reason only former employees ever comment is because the current ones are terrified of their boss.