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.