After Apple

There’s been some talk lately about Apple and its infamous secrecy. The claims being bandied around state that because Apple is highly secretive that stock holders have little information about the company, not much less than partners that Apple is working with. For my part at Apple, I can say that those things are very, very true. Secrecy is insanely big at Apple, and it causes its own problems internally.

In AppleCare, we heard about products when the customer did. We crowded around the break room television set (we got lives feeds of all of the Steve events) and watched and waited for new items to come out. Every time something like iWeb was announced we’d groan “Oh, great, that’ll be hell to support…” and when we saw that Mac OS X got a little easier to use or an old feature request filled, we’d applaud the team that did it. It was odd, really. It was like AppleCare was a whole other company rather than a division. We had absolutely no general contact with the rest of Apple, especially product designers.

Some in AppleCare knew, though. The folks whose job it is to respond first to large issues coming down would know in many cases, as would managers (towards the last minute), and the trainers and others whose job it was to ready the training materials and such. But for those that knew, nothing was leaked even internally to the group of people that really needed to know: the actual support agents. We always found out with the rest of the world.

There’s a few good reasons for this, you learn. We were “customer facing” employees and talked all day. Many would spill in ten seconds, others accidentally within a day or two, but, eventually, it would be spilled in high detail to a good number of people calling in. If you’re trying to keep a secret, telling the people that talk to customers all day isn’t the best idea. Also, phone monkeys like to get trained once. Products change during development, so they wait for it to be final to really go into detail with the phone jocks.

And yet, that’s all justification from actually working there and drinking the Kool-Aid. It’s a stupid policy and it’s stagnating Apple’s adoption in larger groups. Apple’s always had elements of Steve Jobs’ broken personality ingrained deep within it, and this is no different. Everything’s a secret until you release it, even normal product bumps. No, we’re not going to limit information about features and just tell you when a bump will happen, we’ll just not say anything and surprise you, okay? It makes for a grand show in the end, with lots of really surprised people and everyone applauds and screams and the little women faint and Jobs walks off a compu-rock star. Meanwhile, companies will wait six months to a year to adopt anything because they need advance notice so they can properly plan. New sales will sag, Apple’s financial outlook will be poor, stock will go down, and everyone investing will be upset.

Every time.

And yet, if Apple would just step away from Jobs’ overbearing salesmanship for a moment and just put out a timeline in vague quarters saying “we expect to announce the next desktop professional Mac in 2006Q4” then everyone would be happy. They don’t have to get into the gritty details of it, just let someone have an idea of when.

You’d think rebranding Apple products would net you better treatment, but HP didn’t get it. In fact, HP was being harassed to be even more secretive about their development even after the Apple-branded iPod was shipped they were being told to keep their development secret. It’s overbearing and slightly crazy, really. The product is already out, and they’re telling their vendor to keep it hush-hush.

Internally, there were different codenames in different areas for different groups, some words, some letters and numbers. You could tell which groups were talking about what by the names things went around as. I’d discuss examples but I enjoy my fiscal freedom. It was crazy, though. The whole company was so scared of letting any little detail out that security was one of the very first things new contractors and employees would learn about, even before learning how to use the products they would support.

It was pervasive, oppressive, invasive, and stupid. I can’t believe that a thirty-year-old technology giant like Apple is still this infantile with their development process, and it’s one of the major things holding Apple back from being great. It’s also one of the major things scaring the crap out of employees that are trusted with information. One little slip and you’re gone. In many ways, it was like working for the government in an intelligence position, and that’s not what anyone signed up for.

I have no hopes for Apple in this regard. Just as middle-manager one-ups-manship is ingrained into the culture, so is this insane paranoia. Apple will always be secretive to the point of fault, partners and large customers will never see plans before they happen, and Apple stock will always crash after MacWorld. It’s how things are.

The Inside View of Secrecy at Apple