
Oh My God! Apple Killed ThinkSecret! Those Bastards! - terpua
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/20/oh-my-god-apple-killed-thinksecret-those-bastards/
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pg
Though I'm an Apple fan, it bothers me the way they seem to skate just along
the border of evil. Can you imagine Google shutting down a Google rumors site?

Theory: Steve Jobs is overreaching to the point of evil, but he's also smart
enough to hire hackers who are more than yes-men, and they push back when he
wants to do something too bad.

I suppose this is ultimately what keeps Google honest too. If so, then being
good and hiring smart hackers are inseparable; and that means as companies
increasingly can't win without smart hackers, they'll have to become
increasingly good.

(By "become" here I mean in the sense that populations become a certain way
through evolution. I'm not proposing any given company will get nicer. Just
that good companies will increasingly triumph over evil ones.)

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ecuzzillo
Most accounts I've heard say that Microsoft was the place to be in the early
90's, and many smart people wanted to work there, particularly ones coming out
of college, and Microsoft software was crap because executive decisions and
backward compatibility made it crap, not because their hackers were crap.
People who read the Windows 2000 source leak said that it was fairly uniformly
well-written code, whose comments indicated that its authors knew they were
making everything ugly and klugey, but couldn't do much about it and preserve
compatibility.

So I somewhat doubt that good employee hackers can steer a fundamentally
really evil main guy away from being evil.

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henning
I don't like Apple's secrecy fetish. It reminds me of Dick Cheney.

I hate it when Robert Scoble is right, but Apple really needs to open up with
respect to things like blogging.

Channel 9 made Microsoft, of all companies, feel a lot more human and a lot
less evil.

I realize this is incompatible with the Mac cult and "one more thing"
Stevenote surprises.

~~~
staunch
I think it's going a bit far to compare Cheney and Jobs. One is an elected
official subject to the transparency of a democracy and who costs lives and
billions of dollars when he lies. The other is the CEO of a commercial
enterprise who's a control freak and occasionally gets a little nasty with
people who leak news about his gadgets.

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mattmaroon
They sure seem to be floundering in the good will department these days.

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inovica
I think that if Apple wants to keep its products secret then they should be
allowed to do whatever they can to do this. I must admit to wondering if they
have 'used' this system in the past to pre-test market reaction to potential
products as well as to provide them within another avenue of publicity. The
problem is that false rumors surface and I think this can damage Apple. Just
my own thoughts of course, but I don't think that this is a bad thing

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shayan
I am happy that apple wasn't able to or didn't try hard enough to find the
informer

