

Apple is run like a huge startup (and the remote app was written by 1 guy) - bradgessler
http://sachin.posterous.com/apple-is-run-like-a-huge-startup

======
larsberg
This article, like many others, seems to overestimate how large the actual
numbers of developers is at Microsoft, as opposed to full teams with Test and
mgmt and their associated marketing, sales, etc. organizations.

The .NET GC was roughly 1 person (sometimes a little less, sometimes a little
more). Most of the base class libraries were one person. Even larger things,
like the text editor, were usually a senior person and one or two very junior
ones. And this is software that has to run on a not-at-all-fixed set of
hardware platforms :-)

In my time there, I never saw or heard anyone "think they can solve problems
by throwing lots of people at them." Uniformly, the decisions made to get
things shipped were to either cut the features that were the combination of
the furthest behind and least value to the market or to pull over extremely
senior talent that had already gotten their parts shipped.

Of course, it was a big company, so YMMV. Can't speak for much more than dev
tools, office, and windows.

~~~
refulgentis
Not to be obtuse, or maybe miss the joke, but how can you sometimes have a
little less than 1 person working on one of the most important parts of your
runtime?

Sounds like a bug more than a feature to me. :)

~~~
Samuel_Michon
"Full-time equivalent (FTE) is a way to measure a worker's involvement in a
project, or a student's enrollment at an educational institution. An FTE of
1.0 means that the person is equivalent to a full-time worker, while an FTE of
0.5 signals that the worker is only half-time. Typically, different scales are
used to calibrate this number, depending on the type of institution (schools,
industry, research) and scope of the report (personnel cost, productivity)."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-time_equivalent>

------
volski
_Maybe that's the problem at Microsoft: they think they can solve problems by
throwing lots of people at them. They put together large teams to build
products. And large teams require managers._

I didn't know Microsoft had a problem, they seem to be doing pretty well. They
have some good products. Apple being successful doesn't necessarily translate
to Microsoft sucking. They are both damn good companies.

~~~
Cabal
_I didn't know Microsoft had a problem, they seem to be doing pretty well._

In the mobile market? How about anything next-generation web? Social media?
Microsoft doesn't seem to be _doing well_ anywhere except the increasingly
unimportant desktop and Office suite space.

~~~
volski
Windows Live, Bing, Xbox, Servers, Cloud Services...

It's easy to bash on them, but they make quality products in a diverse range
of markets. Sure they fail and fail big, but who the hell doesn't? If you have
made anything successful, you've probably failed 100s of times. It comes with
the territory.

~~~
Cabal
_Windows Live, Bing, Xbox, Servers, Cloud Services_

Did you have any examples that contradicted me? All of the above are losing MS
money in a BIG way.

~~~
Locke1689
Um, not to get all defensive, but we at STB are making quite a bit of money.
It's probably over a million a quarter per developer. I don't know many people
who can say that. ;)

~~~
megablast
Are you only including developers, or all the people who work on a product? I
imagine that MS has a rather large team of non-developers working on products
as well.

You want to be careful with that metric. You know the cleaners don't make much
money, why not fire them?

~~~
Locke1689
I did actually mean all the people that work in development on the product.
That is, in MS terms, all SDE, SDET, and PMs. I happen to know this figure is
accurate for Windows (over a million per developer), although that doesn't
include sales/marketing, administrative costs, etc. As for the cleaners
comment, I don't really get your point.

Anyway, my statistic wasn't really meant to be taken that seriously, just
proof that server is actually making money over here.

------
commandar
"The engineers on the Mac OS and iOS teams move back and forth between the two
projects based on release cycles and what's needs to ship next."

As somebody who has been rather dismayed with the way the Macintosh platform
has started to stagnate in the past couple of years, I don't really view this
as a _good_ thing.

~~~
wriq
Stagnate? Snow Leopard is just under a year old. I wouldn't expect a desktop
OS to have a same release frequency as a mobile os.

~~~
_delirium
Oddly, Debian has about the same release cycle (once per 12-18 months), and
ends up being the butt of lots of jokes about how they rarely ever release
anything.

~~~
commandar
Debian has only recently settled on a 2 year feature freeze cycle. In the
past, Debian has suffered from releases being pushed back due to constant
feature creep in the name of stability -- that's much of the reason why Ubuntu
was forked from Debian in 2004.

So the jokes may be dated in 2010, but there's a reason they came about in the
first place.

------
Hates_
Very similar in a way to what I read on this post:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1568395> (7 Scaling Strategies Facebook
Used To Grow To 500 Million Users)

    
    
      Small, Independent Teams. Small teams 
      allow work to be done efficiently, quickly, 
      and carefully. Only three people work on photos, for
      example, the largest photo site on the internet.

------
stcredzero
I am reminded of one of the companies from _Neuromancer_. Was it Maas-Neotek?
Gibson described most large companies as being composed mostly of flab, with a
few hard bits of "edge." But there was this one large company that was _all
edge_. It was a predator amongst its peers.

For awhile Apple was just eating everyone's lunch because they were the only
ones who understood end-to-end User Experience.

Apple's stated strategy for quite awhile was having the computer as the
"digital hub." The target was clearly a merging of all media with the
computing experience. Can you imagine what Microsoft could've done with XBox
if they had UX and vision in the same league as Apple? It was like they
already had troops dug in place in the key strategic spot. Apple would've been
_crushed_. Instead, Apple walked all over them.

~~~
joezydeco
Michael Lopp of Apple tends to confirm that statement on a recent tweet:

 _"Apple is run like a huge startup that makes 15 billion a quarter and has,
ya'know, a strategy."_

------
latortuga
To be honest, I thought the remote app was great for about 5 minutes. Then it
suddenly couldn't connect to my library until I went back and re set the code.
It functions exactly as if one guy wrote it and never updated it.

------
wallflower
The iBooks app, too, with all the sexy page turning animation was written by
one guy (before it became big).

~~~
irrelative
As a UI developer with about 5 years of experience, that seems about right to
me. I think I could have written that app given about 8 months. Heck, I
suspect that the page turning animation was a relatively small part of the
development.

I don't consider myself a fantastic developer either. I'd be suspicious of any
developer with a few years experience who couldn't write an application like
that given the right amount of time and motivation.

This isn't to belittle your comment, just that I'm thinking to myself "yeah,
that sound correct".

~~~
Maktab
I think more interesting than the fact that one guy wrote the entire
application is that Apple gave one guy the time and space to create the
application on his own.

------
Setsuna
_"Maybe that's the problem at Microsoft: they think they can solve problems by
throwing lots of people at them."_

Does the author provide anything to support this claim? and seriously, I
wonder why every pro-apple author couldn't resist the urge to belittle other
companies. No company is "perfect".

------
palish
_Maybe that's the problem at Microsoft: they think they can solve problems by
throwing lots of people at them._

No they don't.

------
blacksquare
I'm really not sure how this is relevant to a company that has over 15,000
employees (non retail). If you've done any work for apple or their HR
department you would most certainly know it's not run like a startup.

------
blhack
downvoters: Sorry if this question was offensive; I'm asking about if the
"apple is like a startup" trend continues into developers being able to choose
what kind of tools they want to work with. My complaining about my MBP isn't
meant as a critique of apple, I'm just saying that _if it was me_ I would
probably choose a linux machine, not a mac.

I apologize for the off-topic question, but is anybody here a coder for apple
(or has been in the past?)?

Are you allowed to use a non-apple computer if you work at apple?

I just got a macbook pro over the weekend (my first mac) and it seems like
they've really gone out of their way to make this as difficult as possible to
write code on. No page up/down keys...no dedicated delete key, no home/end
keys...it seems like the UI is designed around the mouse. Alt-Tabbing seems
really neutered in comparison to the gnome/kde/windows equivalents...and the
solution that is offered is the expose' key (which works, but involves using
the mouse).

Is there just a steep learning curve? Don't get me wrong, the machine is very
pretty, but it seems like the type of work that geeks do was ignored when they
designed this laptop (like having no dedicated right click key?)

Obviously they were talking about apple being run like a startup in that the
teams are small...one of the things that I see advertised on some job postings
for coding jobs is that there is a LOT of flexibility on what your workstation
is...is it like this at apple?

~~~
jacobolus
<http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html>

Also, in Exposé it's possible to tab between applications and use the arrow
keys to select windows.

As for right click: on an Apple trackpad, two finger click works much better
for me than right click (either tap with two fingers or click with the thumb
while two other fingers are on the trackpad) ever did on a windows laptop.
YMMV.

FWIW, I also prefer the Mac ⌘⇥ (command-tab) behavior. You can drag stuff in
and out of command-tab, you can hide or quit applications from it (Q and H
keys), you can use either keyboard or mouse (or scroll wheel) to select apps,
etc.

I think you’re mostly just unfamiliar with it... which is perfectly natural,
but you might try phrasing your question in a less aggressive manner.

~~~
blhack
Hmm... Thank you. Honestly though, I was just generally curious about if apple
devs are allowed to use non-apple computers.

~~~
wallflower
Not devs but it is rumored that deep in the inner sanctums of the product
engineering/design labs there are PC workstations running 3D/CAD/CAM/CAE
software.

------
betterlabs
Its indeed awesome for a company as large as Apple to keep things this way. I
have several friends at Cisco and Oracle and the teams there are just bloated
beyond belief. I think a lot of this flows top down and the management needs
to get it. Once you work at a well-run startup, you know that the only way to
get things done is with small teams and a core team of star engineers who move
around and get things done.

------
rythie
Is this really that surprising? It doesn't seem that complicated a project.
Big companies surely don't have a team for every little project.

Wasn't the Facebook app written by one guy. Also TweetDeck was originally by
one guy. Wasn't Reddit built by 4 people and Posterous basically by 2 or 3
people? And all for those apps the same people did all the business and
marketing too.

------
lovskogen
Because of the Remote App was written by one guy, Apple is a huge startup?

~~~
bradgessler
No, that's just an interesting fact from the article. I assumed they assembled
a crack-team of iPhone engineers to bang this out. I was surprised that one
person put together such a high-quality app, especially in a company that
could afford to throw lots of money/developers/teams to solve this problem.

~~~
philwelch
That reminds me of an old story about the Texas Rangers. In 1896, Texas Ranger
Captain Bill McDonald was sent to prevent an illegal prizefight in Dallas.
Upon his arrival, the mayor of Dallas was confused why they only sent one
Ranger, to which McDonald responded, "Ain't I enough? There's only one prize-
fight!"

The story isn't true (there were several Texas Rangers on hand to prevent the
prizefight) but I'm not surprised there's one, really talented guy working
part time on the Remote app, as "there's only one app!".

------
mcritz
Maybe if Apple had more people they could make Mobile Me work like it should,
release a new Mac Pro more frequently than once every two years, have a 64bit
completely multithreaded Final Cut Pro written in Cocoa APIs, or something
something antenna something…

~~~
Setsuna
Just because something _can_ be done doesn't necessarily mean it _has_ to be
done.

