Jan 11 2007
It’s a known-fact in the industry that Apple is legendary when come to safeguards new product announcements. It sure isn’t an easy task to keep secret about iPhone for 30 months from friends and close family members but Apple has its’ own proprietary cultures and policies to the envy of Pentagon or CIA and at the same time innovate to the highest degree never seen before.
If you’re an employee of Apple Inc (Nasdaq : AAPL, stock), you need to live up to the super-high standard set by Steve if you do not wish to be booted out. There was a story where Jobs once demanded that a designer of a new Mac not allow a single visible screw. When the designer built a prototype that had one screw, tucked out of sight under a handle, Jobs fired him. Ray Riley, a former Apple designer who now runs Nike’s (NYSE : NKE, stock) Advanced Innovation Div. used to say “Apple is the most design-savvy company in the world, and it’s because of Steve Jobs,”
But besides a strong design team which is rumored to command starting salary of around $200,000, some 50% above the industry average, Apple has been very successful in guarding their next generation design from outsiders.
Amongst others:-
Apple’s tight privacy policy whereby many Apple employees aren’t allowed into the large open studio where designers are located, for fear they’d catch a glimpse of some upcoming product.
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Steve Jobs’ trust on his low-profile, Senior Vice-President for Industrial Design, Jonathan Ive.
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Apple makes it clear to employees and business partners that they will be dismissed and possibly prosecuted for leaking company secrets.
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Apple will sue bloggers and other independent journalists for posting purported advance information about unannounced Apple products.
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Supply business-partners [ including Cingular Wireless, Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq : YHOO, stock) and Google Inc. (Nasdaq : GOOG, stock) ] with a fake-out user-interface design that bore no resemblance to the final one, so that its programmers wouldn’t know what they were working on.
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Apple crafted bogus handset prototypes to show not just to Cingular executives, but also to Apple’s own workers.
It was reported that at one point, when Cingular executives pointed out that the phone lacked a certain button, Apple reported response – “Don’t worry, we can always add that after the phone ships.” It was a reference to the fact that on a touch-screen phone, adding a button is just a software upgrade but that reply indeed kept Cingular executives cracking their heads in disbelief until the official launch of iPhone.
Nevertheless the success of Apple is largely due to Jobs’ capabilities in setting the direction and provides the inspiration for the company. But the great and innovative design and culture plus policies which was much needed gel very well resulting in an excellent business model.
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January 11th, 2007 by financetwitter
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