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Apple Planning To Build Private Restaurant
First time accepted submitter a90Tj2P7 writes "Apple is building a 21,468 square foot private restaurant in Cupertino so employees can talk shop over lunch without being overheard. Apple's director of real estate facilities, Dan Wisenhunt, stated that: 'We like to provide a level of security so that people and employees can feel comfortable talking about their business, their research and whatever project they're engineering without fear of competition sort of overhearing their conversations.'"
>apple
>research
nice try
Adele Goldberg -- "actually, i did think of that, and told you guys, but you ignored me"
Consumer - "and that democratization of information between Xerox, Apple, and Microsoft brought technology to the masses and created the computer revolution of the 80s and 90s"
Apple CEO - "and we cant have that again, because the 80s and 90s were brutal for the entrenched interests. like Xerox"
Google - "no shit. thats why you shouldnt base your fucking business model on making information secret, when your entire history has been based on borrowing ideas from other people"
I hope they serve more than just apples.
If they don't know those have microphones and cameras, they won't realize security is a waste of time.
or that you can hear everything just by the vibrations off of the windows.
be vewwy vewwy quiet, I'm hunting trilobytes.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
employee dorms to prevent honey trap operations.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Oops looks like there is a bug, /., this post belongs to another story :-)
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
And lose iPhone prototypes without being publicly embarrassed.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
I've worked for big companies, and for startups. I have to say that on-campus dining facilities are pretty standard for big companies. We normally call them "cafeterias" but if you want to call it a restaurant knock yourself out.
Not to mention that Google's in-house chefs are a thing of legend. I really don't see what's news here.
Apple has a wonderful cafeteria and a seriously epic variety of food, they are just out of space (food stations are being set up outside etc...). Makes perfect sense for them to house a larger "restaurant" (aka cafeteria) so employees don't have to head out to the local BJ's. Why is this being spun as an OMG Apple is too wealthy and splurging. Yahoo and others have freaking DMV and hairstyling services for employees (okay maybe Yahoo is not the best example here....)
* We dance where angels fear to tread *
Seriously, many of the reasons for building in-house cafes was to allow those kinds of discussions to occur. Yet, many conversations occur outside in other restaurants. As such, they should have the dining room divided into multiple sections so that it is possible to have conversation with outsiders, but not having others listening in.
Also, they should seriously consider the idea of having multiple kitchens in it, and allow new chefs that come up with new concepts test it out there and then fund them for other restaurants if it is liked.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Applebee's
Bow before me, for I am root.
Ah, yes. Blind loyalty and marketing. This explains why approaching 50% of their customers have never owned an Apple product before. Why they have the largest digital music download store, the best selling digital music player, the best selling cell phone, the highest customer satisfaction rating, and the best profit margins in the industry.
Whatever kool-aid you're drinking is working.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Only a slashtard is arrogant enough to call Apple arrogant for calling it a private restaurant when the only source to use that term was friggin' CNet. It's an addition to the Apple campus containing a cafeteria, lounge, and meeting rooms.
How about "Walled Garden"?
Um no. The author of the article called it a private restaurant. No one from Apple called it that. The author also says that's the commission calls it but they might have used "dining facility". From the article the author also says:
The facility will have two stories, meetings rooms, lounge areas, conference rooms, storage lockers, an underground parking lot, and, yes, even restrooms.
It doesn't sound like it's just a restaurant or cafeteria but a building annex of some sort.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Any other company could do what they do.
You'd think that they would, then. It seems to be profitable.
Problem solved, declares DHS Chief Janet Napolitano.
"Doing it better" in business means more profitably or at least with better margins. Which company is "doing it better than Apple"?
Not surprise, indeed kind of surprised it's 1: not already the case, 2: it would raise any interest external to the enterprise concerned, In fact in house restaurants or cafes (or for the down market canteens) are pretty much De jure for most of the large research organisations I've worked for. Actually one good thing about them is it encourages conversation between areas that would normally not have communications beyond hierarchical memo passing and divisional manager meetings so, for a not entirely hypothetical example - people from the material sciences area end up talking over lunch to people from the electronic engineering area and people from the remote sensing area and so a project is born to build more resistant tidal sensors that don't need to be replaced every 3 or 4 months.
1. Walled Garden Salad
2. Beleaguered Sea Bass
3. ThaiPad
Most larger companies have one of these. It's called a cafeteria.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Manager: We're building a fancy new cafeteria, just like Google and a lot of other Si Valley companies.
Assistant: Very good sir. Shall I alert the media?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
So you're saying that every other company in the consumer electronics biz has lousy marketing?
At some point it's gotta break for you apple haters. Apple is popular because they put out products people like. No more, no less.
If it was purely marketing, why hasn't anyone out done apple?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
You've listed one of the very important parts to producing a successful product and/or service, yes. Well done.
Putting Apple's success *entirely* on "marketing and blind loyalty" is one of the biggest reasons Apple does so well while others flounder. It's very easy to dismiss their success out of hand without understanding what it is they do so well.
If it really is "so easy" and that "any company could do what they do" (as the original AC post claimed) then... why aren't they? The goal of a company is to make money. If what Apple is doing is so easy then surely there should be lots of companies rolling in cash?
I'm honestly curious. If it's all 100% marketing, why isn't anyone else doing it? Surely other companies can hire marketing people too, right?
So does Apple, to this day.
Blame Cnet for the embellishment. Maybe they thought the headline "Apple builds cafeteria" wouldn't draw so many page hits? Couldn't possibly be that!
I did a summer internship at Apple in the late 80s and I'm sure things have changed quite a bit since then, but still one thing I thought was pretty clever of them as out-in-the-open evil schemes go was that they made it very very easy for employees to have no life outside of work. There was *tons* of social stuff built into work (happy hour every Friday afternoon, off-site stuff like going to a ball game or an amusement park with your group during work hours), and there were showers in the building and sleeping in your cube was tolerated. Adding a nice restaurant seems obvious -- one more thing covered that might otherwise make you leave work.
1. Apple's marketing people are the best in the consumer electronics industry.
2. Their top management always knew that they were a CONSUMER electronics company. Not a computer company that also made some accessories. Not a technology company or a software company, although they were really good at those things too.
Apple's phone doesn't employ much more advanced tech than high-end Android phones.
Apple's music store doesn't employ any technology that its competitors don't have.
There's nothing unusually compelling about their music players -- any more.
Their distinction is that they got there first.
There are two aspects of marketing where Apple really excelled. The first is conventional marketing: push, push, push that product. The second (which is really the first) is that Apple, unlike its competition, wasn't afraid to go out and create a market where one didn't exist. That's always been part of Apple's business model. It started with the Apple computer. They were the first company to really market computers to home users. They didn't INVENT computers or even computers that could have been sold directly to consumers. They were just the first to ignore their fear that the market wouldn't accept them.
Apple was right out front with the digital music players and a digital music store. Then they were the first to bring music to phones. It's not like nobody had thought of this before. It was all being discussed in electronics companies across the the USA and Japan. Lots of engineers had great ideas for how this would work. They all knew how these things could be done. But at these other companies management wasn't interested in taking a risk on introducing a new category of consumer product. Apple was all about that risk.
Steve Jobs, specifically, wanted to be first because he knew how much being first was worth.
The Apple Restaurant #1 seller is simply a whopper in a new wrapper that will only cost you 14.99 + tax + applecare with no pickles or onions to spare you any chance of heartburn, and any modifications must be approved by the CEO, but may be revoked later
Have it your way!
I recall signs on the wall at the cafeteria on Apple's main campus that warned employees not to chat about their work
I worked there for three and a half years as an employee, and I've been back twice as a consultant, and I've never seen any such signs.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
So your explanation is that Apple has a dominate position because they have a dominate position. That makes perfect sense, unless there was some point in the past when Apple was near failure, had virtually no capital, and a negligible market share in all their market segments. But if that was ever the case I guess we can just say "magic" got them to where they are, so we don't have to admit anyone ever wanted to buy an Apple product on its merits.
They never got there first. There were other computers, tablets, other music players, other music stores, other phones with music. You're talking out your ass.
Apple has excellent marketing, yes. Microsoft spends tons on marketing too, but theirs sucks.
What Apple did was to make tech delightful. Simple and elegant. They ditched floppies first. They made it really easy to buy music and put it on a portable device and make playlists without a tutorial. They did something unprecedented when they made the iPhone-- at home activation. I was waiting in line on release day (for the mother-in-law) a hundred people or so from the from the front, yet I walked out with two iPhones 45 minutes after they opened the doors. (then I wisely waited two days before attempting to activate). For the first time, using a web browser on a phone was fun instead of a disappointment.
Look at the consumer section of Dell's on-line store. Look at Apple's on-line store. Now which one is more scary to a non-technical person looking for a personal laptop? Do they want the Intel Core i3, the 2nd Gen Intel Core i3, the 2nd Gen Intel Core i5, the... Do they want IKEA laptop covers? Or do they instead want something that "Handles daily tasks with ease" but is rated 3/5 stars.
The Jukebox 6000, and its successor the Jukebox Studio (see below), used standard USB 1.1 technology, transferring data at a maximum rate of 1 MB per second. These models transfer data at a comparably slow rate compared with succeeding Archos devices using the USB 2.0 standard.
Regarding the popular predecessor to the iPod line, the Archos Jukebox, Wikipedia has this to say:
This device was released Saturday, December 9, 2000 and discontinued as of Friday, May 16, 2003. It weighs 350 g.
The Jukebox is historically notable for shipping with a user interface and operating system so unfriendly and bug-ridden as to inspire Björn Stenberg and other programmers to begin to develop a superior, free and open-source replacement operating system. This project became Rockbox.[citation needed]
Apple isn't so much about making "new categories of consumer product" as they are about finding broken categories of overly complex and unsatisfactory products and re-imagining them as delightful products. I've supported family on Windows and on Macs.. once they get Macs, they don't call me even 1/10th as much for support issues.
Wild guess, are you around 13 years old?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."