Super Volatile

That phone also runs the Mango operating system and it’s a gorgeous device, with an elegant shell beautifully crafted from a single piece of polycarbonate plastic. The operating software is smooth and fast. In many ways the Lumia 800 was the nicest phone I’ve ever used. It makes the iPhone seem old and outdated, and makes Android phones seem big and clunky.

I'm happy to learn that soon after I left Nokia it began to slowly recover from the crisis that started roughly at the time when I joined the company.

The Amazon Kindle is full of all sorts of amazing, delightful touches — the sort of thing you’d expect from an Apple product. For example, when you first take your Kindle out of its (gorgeous!) box, it boots right up knowing your name and logged into your account. This is actually out-Apple-ing Apple: it’s possible because Amazon not only controls the hardware and the software, but the entire distribution channel; they know exactly who is going to get each Kindle.

Amazon is getting close to Apple's level of user experience, sometimes even exceeding them. But it's not quite there yet in some areas.

1. A developer may not injure Apple or, through inaction, allow Apple to come to harm.
2. A developer must obey any orders given to it by Apple, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A developer must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Jeff Atwood on the dictatorship of Apple and developers's acceptance of the situation.

I have traveled to southern China and interviewed workers employed in the production of electronics. I spoke with a man whose right hand was permanently curled into a claw from being smashed in a metal press at Foxconn, where he worked assembling Apple laptops and iPads. I showed him my iPad, and he gasped because he’d never seen one turned on. He stroked the screen and marveled at the icons sliding back and forth, the Apple attention to detail in every pixel. He told my translator, “It’s a kind of magic.

A different kind of obituary of Steve Jobs.

This all marks a significant leap forward in the sometimes hostile Facebook and Apple relationship. It began well when Apple first set up an Apple Students group on Facebook in 2006 — “a monster success” for both companies, according to a source who spoke with Mashable on the condition of anonymity.

But the companies would butt heads many times in the following years.

The short history of cold war between Facebook and Apple.

This screenshot of Windows Explorer from Windows 8 has been already ridiculed by everybody and his dog. It's looking like Apple and Microsoft, both having 30 years of experience in interface design, reached radically different conclusions.

Reading the article clearly shows that Microsoft's design is driven by data. Apple, on the other hand, seems to employ designers.

The world of Apple is not an easy one to understand by just buying a product and using it.  I think most techonogly writers would agree that Apple makes great if somewhat expensive products.  Most Apple users really care more about the experience of being an Apple user than they care about price.  They are willing to pay a premium to have, hold, admire, and use whatever product that Apple produces that meets one of their needs.  The needs do not have to be strictly computing needs.  You might need to be a member of the group of people who are using the latest, thinnest, lightest, and greatest technology like the iPad.  You could probably do most of what you do with the iPad with some other device, but Apple has come up with a good idea which makes it easy to sell yourself on the product.

But is it possible that Apple, a company which delivers great products, has had to lose its soul in the process of delivering those products?

I was fortunate to start with Apple the fall that the Macintosh was introduced.  I had been using and selling Apple products in reseller world prior to that starting in mid 1982. Going to work for Apple in those days was like nothing else I had ever experienced. It was a roller coaster with just about every emotion that you can imagine.  It was a place where very bright people worked incredibly hard not because of the money, but because of what the company was doing.

So the first question that comes to mind, “What do you mean it wasn’t because of money?”  Well to be very honest, I not only took a pay cut to go to work for Apple, but I also had to resign my previous job before they would even interview me.  My first job at Apple paid about $36,000 a year, and there was no boat load of stock options.  Of course I was taking a long term view, and I believed that Apple would become a great company.  In 1984 that was no certainty, and in the mid-nineties when many of us worked to keep Apple afloat, the question was more about survival than greatness.

Still during those early years at Apple, in spite of the challenge, you did feel like you were part of something very important that was changing many people’s lives.  I got to see people take computers and do things with them that they never imagined that they could do.  For much of my Apple career, I was working in higher education, and I got to be part of the very unique partnership that developed between many of the leading higher education institutions and Apple.  It was a relationship that was a win-win for both sides.  Together higher education and Apple were able to take computing for the rest of us farther than either could have done by themselves.  Like much of Apple’s history, there were intiatives started by Apple that changed computing, but Apple never figured out how to collect revenue from them, and perhaps that was part of the problem that led to changes at Apple.

There came a time when Apple probably could not afford to be a partner.  There was also a part of Apple that was dreaming up far too many ideas that never made it to market or if they did, ended up only confusing the market.

When Steve came back, Apple focused on fewer products, dropped technologies like the Newton, printers, scanners, and cameras.  The operating system was modernized, and at the top level of Apple, the executives started caring more about driving stock prices than almost anything.

All sorts of things happened along the way.  Apple dropped customer advisory boards except for perhaps the higher education one which I suspect that they have only for window dressing if it is even still there.  While Apple was still happy to collect revenue and high margins from the publishing world, there was little effort to really invest in that part of the market.

Mostly that was because Apple’s top level management had figured out with the help of the iPod that there was far more money to be made selling inexpensive consumer items than there was in trying to dislodge Microsoft from the enterprise or even from most desktops.

Below this 30,000 ft view of what happened at Apple, much more happened inside the company.  Up front I want to say that what I am about discuss could be a larger trend in American business, but my guess is that there are some unique to Apple characteristics that might not be present in all corporations. I can only describe what I saw when I was a part of Apple.

There is a really strange thing that happens to long term Apple employees.  Whether you are a manager or just an individual contributor, you develop a hardened shell.  It has to do with watching valued colleagues leave the company.

A lot of people end up leaving Apple without choosing to do so.  In nineties, I laid off very competent, talented people just because the company had decided we no longer needed an office in a particular area. Even those decisions were often weird. A position would be open just prior to a layoff, and we then we would gear up for a layoff. It was an easier thing  to kill an office with one person and one open headcount than it was to kill an office with two people.  With that strange lack of business logic, we eventually ended up with no Apple business coverage in the state of Pennsylvania which was one of our top states in revenue.

It was very hard to hire people even in positions that were desperately needed. I remember saving for years a job requisition that had over 20 signatures approving it, but unfortunately it did not get the last two required one before the next layoff, so the position got eliminated. 

Apple also decided that the best way to create top producing teams was to make some people the bottom third each year.  Ideally you got rid of the bottom third each year, and hired new better people. The problem with the theory which I think is popular in many companies is that people are not widgets.  There is institutional memory in long term employees.

Many of the enterprise sales people that I had in my organization were career sales people who had been selling longer than Apple existed, they excelled at building relationships which is what you have to do if you are going to sell essentially consumer products to the enterprise.  Not only were they professionals at the peak of their sales careers, but they were also passionate about Apple technology.  To a person they had all had an Apple moment when they figured out that Apple products could change their lives and the lives of others who used the product.  They were proud to be part of the company, and often I would have to kick them out of the office at 8 PM and tell them to go home to their families.

At the same time people were watching very qualified colleagues disappear, Apple was bringing in a new level of sales management.  This was being done because Apple at the highest level believed that number one, Apple products sell themselves and number two, any product which doesn’t sell is having that problem because the Apple sales force is useless.

One of the best examples of this was Apple’s now forgotten Xserve.  As always the product was developed in typical Apple secrecy.  It was thrown over the wall in Cupertino, and when boats loads didn’t sell, it was determined that the sales force had to go to boot camp on the product to learn how to sell it.  The funny thing was that most of the training ended up coming from the sales force.  So in the strange world of Apple you can have a supposedly incompetent sales force coming up with training for itself.   The reality was that Apple had an amazing sales force, but it had thrown the Xserve over the wall without understanding was needed to be successful in the server market. The sales people knew what the market wanted because they talked to customers.  They also had customers who loved Apple’s products enough to try to figure out how to use them no matter what the limitations. And it turns out that by the time Apple figured out what the market wanted on servers, the market passed Apple by and the Xserve died.

Another great example was when the vp of Apple’s business division decided that the way for Apple to penetrate the business market was to sell kiosks built around the iMac. A huge amount of effort was put into this sales initiative.  A lot of very talented sales people took these orders and marched off to their own doom.  They did absolutely what was asked of them and had more success than the crazy initiative merited. 

When the initiative inevitably failed, the vp was shuffled off into a new position and about a third of the sales people were let go.  I was fortunate Apple had already laid off almost all of the federal team, and I was off trying to take on the world’s largest enterprise customer with two sales people and one system engineer, myself and my administrative assistant.  The funny thing is that we became wildly successful, but that is another story.

The most interesting thing about the new sales managers brought in by Apple was that most of them did not have a clue about Apple products.  It turns out that selling Apple products without knowing anything about them is not an easy chore, but it was at least amusing watching these “sales experts” bang their heads again brick-walls both at Apple corporate and at the customer.

At the same time Apple was changing sales management, they were also rolling out retail stores which turned out to be competition for existing Apple sales people.  For three years my federal team was the one of the few teams who cooperated, supported, and drove sales through the Apple stores.  We were compensated on gear that federal customers bought at those stores.  We had worked the pricing so that federal customers could get the same online federal pricing at the store.  We made it so the customer could chose how to buy based on their preference not ours.

Apple also brought in some additional sales folks to shake up the sales force. Some were from Oracle. If you have been around the technology business very long either on the customer or the sales side, I really don’t have to explain the reputation of the Oracle sales force.  These folks came to Apple talking widgets and pipelines which ended with Apple sales people spending more time tracking their sales than actually making the sales.

About this time Apple stopped giving stock options to most lower level sales people.  Stock options which in theory are the retirement plan at technology companies were never distributed in serious numbers below the level of vice president at Apple.  I should also mention that many Apple employees including, my best former boss, went on to very successful careers at other technologies and ended up making far more money there than they did at Apple.

So if you put all this in the backdrop of company which doesn’t trust its field employees to the point of asking them to leave a customer non-disclosure, you get an environment where it is possible to make great products and lose your soul.

I became numb to watching other employees get fired.  As a manager I had to either fire people that I did not want to fire or put extreme pressure on people until they left.  Yes, there were some people who needed to go, but those were the easy one.  You could have a conversation with them and get them to agree that they were in a job where they didn’t have all the skills they needed to be successful. Most appreciated the experience of having worked at Apple and knew they were not a fit.  The challenges were the people who were good, talented folks and still had to go.  Maybe they didn’t make their number because of budget cuts in the agency they called on, or more likely we got the quota wrong because Apple’s laughable IT system could not tell us what federal customers bought.

With a never ending stream of good people leaving, you end up building this shell around yourself which lets you watch good people be forced out of the company for reasons which would be laughed at by normal people.  You try not to feel anything but relief that it is not you that has been shown the door.

With many new managers coming in, they often brought their buddies, no matter how qualified or un-qualified they might have been.  The running joke at one time was that the best way to get a raise from Apple was to quit, go to work for Oracle, get fired there, and then wait for Apple to rehire you at more than you were making, plus a huge stock options package.

The final nail in the coffin was perhaps the strange Apple theory that the best way to get a strong Apple sales force was to have the Apple sales force compete against itself.  So in the world of Apple which the last time I checked has less than 10%  of the worldwide desktop and laptop market and which has one of the smallest sales forces on earth, Apple’s own sales force should compete against itself for the same customers?

What often happened is that competing sales teams would bring proposals to finance for lower prices in order to win a customer.  So Apple, a company which really has never tried to compete on price, ends up competing on price in order for internal sales people to be paid commissions.  It makes as little sense as it sounds.

When you put all of these changes together you have gone from a company which even at the lowest employee level felt like they were changing lives of others to a company where field sales people keep their heads low, make no waves, and take pleasure in not being the person being fired.

As I have said many times, mine is a sales perspective, but as a director I did interact with product directors and others, and I think you could find some interesting similarities there, but that was not my world, so it is not my story to tell. 

If Apple has a soul these days, it has nothing to do with changing the world.  Apple is company of constricted bandwidth where few people have the authority to do anything that really matters. Apple is not a company where a mistake is a learning experience.  It is a company where who you know means almost everything. Again this might be the same across corporate America, but I believe the fear of being fired colors much of what is done at Apple.  I actually don’t think that fear of being fired is a good way to run a company that might one day need some new leaders.

So what is at the heart of Apple’s psyche in 2011.  It is money and control.  The company wants to make money and is pretty obsessed with it. And the company wants to control almost everything from the customer experience to how files are moved from the iPhone to a computer.

There is nothing wrong with making money. When Apple wasn’t making money, we were all in danger of losing Apple.  I am happy that Apple has moved to the positive side of the ledger, but I think that with all of Apple’s profits, there might need to be some balance restored to build a company with more of a soul.

I have read lots of articles talking about what a deep bench of talent that Apple has. I don’t buy it.  I recently had a friend who worked at Apple describe someone we both knew who is still there. I wasn’t shocked at the description of someone who was miserable in his job, but it did make me think back to the years when everyone at Apple loved their job and felt like they were part of the company’s mission.  The guy hanging onto to his job at Apple was only there for the money.  He had long ago jettisoned important values whose disappearance will come back to haunt him.

I am not going to venture a guess whether or not this lack of a real soul is Steve’s personality draining down to the trenches or if it is a result of too many bean counters and a HR department populated with a few trolls right out of the Dilbert comic strip.

For whatever reasons, Apple has become a very hollowed out company. The products are still great, but I have not gotten any letters from Apple sales employees saying that I am painting an inaccurate picture. In fact that the ones that I get say that I am “spot on.”

So in the end, we will have to see if a company with money at their heart and control defining every decision can continue to make great products ten years from now. I don’t know.  I just know there is a recovery period after being an Apple employee.  It takes a while to see the world in proper perspective.

The best recent example of the sad state of Apple employees that I can think of happened when I received an email from a senior person at Apple who basically has not communicated to me but once in the last six and one half years since I left Apple.  This is someone whose career I helped along a lot, but that is another story.  The email that I got was about an Apple customer who had gotten in trouble with the law.  Well it turns out this was the same customer who at one time ran the IT at a very important client.  A few years ago his servers had gone through a meltdown.  He started calling Apple phone numbers and couldn’t  get anyone until I picked up the phone.  The problem was that I hadn’t worked at Apple for a number of years.  I made some calls and got Apple to talk to him, but it was an embarrassment to the fellow who sent me the email since he was one of the people who didn’t return one of the customer’s phone call.

So the Apple employee’s first communication with me in years happens to be one that tells the story of former customer who embarrassed him and has now gotten in trouble.  I would have rather heard about all the nice stuff that was going on in the Apple employee’s life rather than someone’s else misery, but that is what Apple does to you.  It makes you appreciate misery because it isn’t happening to you at that moment.  Happiness is someone else being miserable.

Whether or not it is a good way to run a company, it certainly isn’t a good way for people to live.

I am proud to have recovered from Apple.  I look at life at lot differently than I did when I was there.  While fame and fortune have yet to find me, I am happy with my life, and I would rather be doing things my way than the Apple way.  I learned a lot in my journey with Apple.  It was an interesting ride, and for most of the almost twenty years that I was there, it was a neat place to be.

As I listened to a presentation at our church recently on the Boy Scout troop that we support, I wondered if Steve Jobs was a Boy Scout?  I am guessing probably not, but I don’t care.  That because I am proud to have been a Boy Scout. The values that I learned in Scouting continue to serve me well.

Then again, my goal isn’t to control the digital world.  I just want to leave the people and places that I touch the way that I found them unless I can make them a little better.

I quoted the article in full because it's been meanwhile removed from the original site. An interesting post from a long time Apple employee on less glamorous aspects of working there.

Cook has so much credibility on Wall Street that effectively, the board might have to offer him the job. Perhaps this entire article could be replaced with, “Look, it’s going to be Tim Cook, and that’s that.

Gruber analyses different options for succession at Apple and, unlike everybody else, seems to be confident about the outcome.

The bottom line is that it is much harder to compete in payments using the same path PayPal took 10 years ago. Creating yet another network based on existing methods is a “me too” strategy that doesn’t provide real incentive for merchants to switch beyond the very specific uses Google and Apple provide today (and, based on the response to Apple’s 30% take rate, even that is not promised).

Interesting analysis of why it might be hard for Google and Apple to offer a payment system that could replace PayPal, by a former PayPal employee.

Now it just so happens that the Industrial Design department HATES how a strain relief looks on a power adapter. They would much prefer to have a nice clean transition between the cable and the plug. Aesthetically, this does look nicer, but from an engineering point of view, it's pretty much committing reliability suicide. Because there is no strain relief, the cables fail at a very high rate because they get bent at very harsh angles. I'm sure that the Engineering division gave every reason in the world why a strain relief should be on an adapter cable, and Customer Service said how bad the customer experience would be if tons of adapters failed, but if industrial design doesn't like a strain relief, guess what, it gets removed.

Explanation why Apple's power cords are failing so often. Yes, it has happened to me too.