After Apple

It’s an often-told story that when Jobs went around finding his first batch of suckers, his sales pitch was to ask them if they wanted a job, or to change the world. After working at Apple for any length of time you realize that this effectively means, “Would you like a salary you can live on, or are hopes and dreams good for you?” Pity the sucker that took that job, for he changed the world and ate crackers and soup.

What Steve really meant, though, outside of stiffing the poor bastard, was that Apple concentrates on creative talent and hutzpah rather than on the meager details of business or life. What matters is the gem, the gold, the shiny new thing that’s going to change the world, and all that little stuff that’s needed to get that done, well, some other fool’s handling that, working the magic, making it work so that you can work on The Next Big Thing.

Sadly, that bohemian view of what it is to work in the age of computing never quite left California.

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.