
Steve Jobs’ Itinerary for Apple's 2011 Top 100 Meeting - sarreph
http://news.rapgenius.com/Steve-jobs-itinerary-for-apples-2011-top-100-meeting-annotated
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atonse
What's really interesting to me about this agenda is - for years I've always
bought into the general apple narrative that they don't _really_ pay that
close attention to what their competitors do, and that they just build what
they feel is the best thing to build, period.

This agenda just makes them seem a bit more "human" (rather than just Jony
Ive's magical workshop of super-designer elves) - at the end of the day, they
are still another company that fears their competitors and closely watches
them, and plans accordingly during these off-site strategy meetings.

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k-mcgrady
I think that they probably take that approach to a point. For example when
introducing brand new products. But when growth is slowing or no longer
existent you have to look at your competitors and see what they've done
differently. The "narrative that they don't _really_ pay that close attention
to what their competitors do" is more of a testament that they don't operate
like Samsung (watch their competitor and copy everything about their product).

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atonse
Right - that makes sense.

I think in my mind I took that too far - that they truly say, forget what
these guys are doing, we know better, and customers will eventually come
around, PERIOD.

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holyjaw
I still don't understand these rapgenius non-lyrical annotations that get
posted here. Why not just write a blog post with your commentary? Having to
click a bunch of times to context-switch between the real content and your
thoughts is just an annoyance.

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ghshephard
I (somewhat) agree that if there is only a single person's feedback, then
RapGenius (perhaps) isn't the ideal model for everyone (though I personally
like it a lot) - but, when you want to group source _everyones_
feedback/annotations, it's awesome.

I read a lot of stuff on Rap Genius, and I find their annotation system to be
one of the best - I was in a packed MRT in singapore, and was able to easily,
with very little mental friction, read through the agenda and annotations,
single handedly - thumb clicking the annotations and back.

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mturmon
More on the concept of the Top 100 retreat --

[http://www.edibleapple.com/2012/01/25/inside-apples-
top-100-...](http://www.edibleapple.com/2012/01/25/inside-apples-
top-100-retreat/)

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l0stb0y
I would have thought a 'Holy War' with Google would also include trying to
steal their best employees. Their illegal pact seems counter-intuitive in this
light.

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shalmanese
The no poach pact ended around the time of this document.

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kaptain
What's a 'tent pole'? Ironically, the RP doc didn't annotate that.

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mturmon
It's a term of art that, in movies, means the big blockbuster that is going to
put the balance sheet in the black, in the process allowing a lot of other
smaller and more risky pictures to be made. It has taken on an analogous
meaning in other domains.

When referring to an OS update, I assume it means the compelling feature(s)
that will get people excited about upgrading.

It's actually interesting that you flagged this, because of course Jobs was
involved in movies thru being the major investor behind Pixar, and he admired
Disney. It seems to illustrate him thinking about parallels between the two
mass markets of computers and movies.

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ams6110
Didn't see maps on the agenda.

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grinich
Probably the reason they screwed it up.

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benjaminjackman
These two lines jumped out at me:

"Google and Microsoft are further along on the technology, but haven't quite
figured it out yet - tie all of our products together, so we further lock
customers into our ecosystem"

"make Apple ecosystem even more sticky"

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dfc
Is using "itinerary" as a synonym for agenda/outline Apple jargon?

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joshmlewis
What's interesting to me is that there was only one point that was still
"confidential"..I wonder if that means all the cats were out of the bag and
it's really up to the new management to innovate?

Or maybe the top 100 doesn't know about the best of the best.

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rimantas
That Item was regarding Verizon iPhone, not some mystery product.

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samyxp17
Do we know if there are really 100 attendees to this meeting ? If that's
indeed the case, is it unusual to have that many people within a company
capable of influencing things ? Any other examples in the corporate world ?

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sarreph
You should read about Jeff Skilling's leadership 'survival of the fittest'
outings at Enron.

I can't find any clear examples on the net, but you should watch The Smartest
Guys in The Room.

Pretty sure there were lots of people that went with him on crazy corporate
holidays.

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samyxp17
I'm not sure this is a mere corporate holiday, it sounds like; in addition to
company stuff (reviews/headcount) real long term strategic decisions get
made/debated in these top 100 gatherings.

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Doctor_Fegg
"create low cost iPhone model based on iPod touch to replace 3GS"

Oh, I wish.

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outside1234
How is this news? Does any company note have a "focal" or "prism" meeting like
this?

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bookwormAT
It's news because the contents of any of these meetings rarely surface to the
public where we can discuss them.

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outside1234
ok, fair point.

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warmfuzzykitten
My favorite is the "average age" line. Why would that question be asked? One
would guess, because he wanted to manage it. Another example of how Jobs had
little respect for the law as it relates to employment practices.

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vayarajesh
They did not mention anything about MacBook Pro and MacBook Air (not even an
update) :/ when they were mentioning about iPad 3

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vilda
This is quite remarkable:

> we further lock customers into our ecosystem

Can't say we don't know it already, but seeing it explicitly mentioned as a
strategy...

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threeseed
Well this is one of the more shameless examples of blog spam I've seen in a
while.

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cleverjake
this isn't a blog post

