

Lessons from Inside Apple: Why Focus is Horrifyingly Scary - swany4
http://swaaanson.tumblr.com/post/25005539624/kindle-notes-inside-apple-by-adam-lashinsky

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gnarbarian
>"Arguments at Apple are personal and confrontational. This began at the top,
and it is part of the company’s culture."

That sounds like a terrible environment.

~~~
its_so_on
It's a terrible environment, but I bet being a supreme court Justice is also a
terrible environment. It also brings out profound conclusions and vision.

When Apple says that battery-life is important in mobile devices, they _mean_
it. If Samsung says it, maybe a year later they will turn around and bring out
an eight-core phone that you can play a game on for forty-five minutes before
having to plug it in again.

Apple isn't just opinionated: it's opinionated on hugely difficult technical
issues that don't even exist in the wild yet. (As when they release a new
category.) You only get that through violent discourse with egos on the line.

edit: a similar thing happens at Google, but not when it comes to ergonomics
or user interfaces and usability with the same hardware devices Apple makes,
but instead when it comes to solving certain problems on a massive scale. The
result is that Google can't really release a laptop that's as usable as a
Macbook in the same domain, and for everyone, and Apple can't really solve the
ops issues that it would take to bring out a Google Search competitor. There
is huge amount of discourse (of a radically different nature) at both
companies.

~~~
fpgeek
> When Apple says that battery-life is important in mobile devices, they mean
> it

No, they don't. They mean battery life is important in mobile devices as long
as it doesn't get in the way of making them thin (among other things). After
all, the modern smartphone with the best battery life is the Droid RAZR MAXX
(soon to be dethroned by its international sibling the Motorola RAZR MAXX,
which doesn't have the battery-life handicap of an LTE radio).

~~~
its_so_on
Apple would never release a laptop with a 1.5 hour battery (wifi web
browsing). an unimaginable number of such laptops are brought out by every
major brand _other_ than Apple.

(likewise apple has its standards in a phone, which is not the standard you
cite, but not 45 minutes either.).

Apple is opinionated on every part of the user interface and design, on
usability and ease-of-use. They then go on to put their money where their
mouth is, and practice what they preach. (For the most part.)

It's very hard to find design decisions at Apple that seem to have 0 thought
or discussion behind them. This is the norm at other companies.

~~~
steverb
The 1.5 hour battery laptop serves (for me) an important niche. You see, I
don't actually need a laptop. I need a portable desktop with built in battery
backup, which is what the 1.5 hour battery laptop is.

Of course, it's entirely within Apple's prerogative to ignore that very niche
market (I would if I were them) and it seems to be working well for them, but
every odd ball computer configuration you see was created to meet the needs of
at least one market. You are not the target market for the desktop replacement
laptop. I am.

~~~
freehunter
In college I loved my desktop replacement. This was before wifi was campus-
wide, so bringing my laptop to class didn't give me much more benefit than
bringing a pad of paper, so the laptop stayed firmly put on my desk all
semester. What was really important to me was being able to haul my computer
out of the dorm in one trip. A desktop would require multiple trips and would
need to be shut down to move (the laptop lasted and hour on battery and 5
hours in sleep mode). A desktop replacement offers almost all the benefits of
a desktop, but with a built-in UPS and a one-piece form factor.

------
kabdib
“High-performance teams should be at each other’s throats” is how one person
with relationships with multiple Apple executives summarized the culture. “You
don’t get to the right trade-off without each person advocating aggressively
for his position.”

How ironic -- when I was at Apple in the 90s, our meetings were scattered
creampuff things and this is how I imagined Microsoft would be. Now that I'm
at Microsoft it's the other way around . . . :-)

~~~
zem
it's interesting how company cultures evolve. i work for google and have a
friend at microsoft, and remarked to him once that our team meetings tend to
have the underlying theme of "how can we make the user go 'whoa! they did
that?!'". he noted that his team meetings tended to be more along the lines of
"how can we crush the competition" (not in a monopolistic sense, just a very
competitive view of technology). he actually felt that that constant sense of
competition made microsoft a more interesting place to work at than google,
whereas i really love how google wants to get things _right_ rather than just
better than anyone else (that's a side effect). both of us agreed that we
would never work at apple, but i can see people of the right temperament
thriving in that culture of obsessive secrecy and constant urgency.

~~~
Evbn
Not working on Android or G+. I infer.

Not fixing that typo, because my Android keyboard is insurmountably glitch.

~~~
zem
no, working on search. i agree the android and g+ teams have a somewhat
different focus, if only because they're attacking entrenched market leaders
rather than getting to lead the market.

------
simonh
At my last company we had one project everyone knew was in crisis, but it was
'strategic' and mandated from on high. At one meeting the product manager
wanted to focus us on the highest priority issues - it turned out to be a list
of more than 10 poorly defined issues. Great job, great people, but management
wanted everything and they wanted it now.

Nine months later and I've just finished my probation period at a small,
scrappy startup with a very specific market niche. Focus is really hard and it
has to be driven by leadership from the top.

~~~
hef19898
My guess is that when things really get critical it is easier for some people
not ot focus on them. And not because focus is scary but what you will see
when you focus is.

These are the moments where you see if your management consists of (war)
leaders or administrators. I say leader for lack of a better word for it. What
I have seen is that there are some people that are really good in tough,
critical situations and others in the routine day-to-day situations. It's more
than just rare that you have both abilities in one person.

Maybe that's why some tribal culture have different leaders for war and peace
time.

~~~
yters
Yes, the military does this too. It is called situational leadership.

------
brown9-2
I hope people don't read things like this as advice for things they could
recreate at their own companies. There are lots of others way to be successful
without being outright mean or vindictive.

~~~
moocow01
I honestly am surprised that there are so many intelligent people who are
willing to put up with this sort of environment. I really like Apple products
but I'd be out the door in a flat second if I was working there and
experienced the kind of culture described. Life is too short.

------
rkwz
"Focus is scary. It means not hedging your bets. It means going all-in. If
you’re not scared, you’re not focused."

~~~
arethuza
Ribbonfarm has an excellent set of articles on the real world dynamics of
organisations (starting with the sociopath/clueless/loser categorisation) but
also introduces various kinds of "language" used:

[http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-
principle-i...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-ii-
posturetalk-powertalk-babytalk-and-gametalk/)

"If you’re not scared, you’re not focused" sounds like "Babytalk" - the
language that sociopaths and losers use to speak to the clueless - who
actually take these statements at face value.

~~~
creamyhorror
Part I of the series: [http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
principle-o...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-
the-office-according-to-the-office/)

It's a great, intriguing read - certainly one that was genuinely new and
unexpected to me.

~~~
hef19898
I finished to read the whole series so far. And it#s just plain impressive!
While you can certainly argue some of its points, you can witness most of the
points in real live.

Funny to classify co-wokers and bosses accordingly. or not so fun, that
depends... :-)

Certainly one of the best reads on organizational psychology I know.

------
tudorw
Sounds like a massive exercise in ball waving ego' nonsense, I am pretty sure
this is not how real progress is made... It's not as if anything Apple did was
truly original (suit on), they are great finishers but I believe true
innovation comes from co-operation.

~~~
taligent
I fail to see how turning around a company from nearly bankruptcy to the
largest in the industry isn't progress.

~~~
tudorw
I meant progress as in 'the idea that the world can become increasingly better
in terms of science, technology, modernization, liberty, democracy, quality of
life, etc.'

~~~
Angostura
As a matter of interest; what do you think the phone market would look like
today if the iPhone hadn't come out. And what about the iTunes Store? Do you
think you'd be able to buy a single track from album, yet?

~~~
freehunter
Thought: what would we _gain_ from a phone market without the iPhone? You'd be
able to buy a phone with a stylus if you wanted (some people do want one) and
a phone you can use with gloves or wet hands. Keyboards would be more common
(rather than being a very small niche). There might be more mainstream
hardware variety, rather than flagship phones all looking exactly alike. We
might have seen true pocket computers (this is the road Palm and Windows
Mobile were going down) instead of pocket _devices_. We might not have a
concept of "jailbreaking", because smartphones prior to the iPhone were
generally not restricted so.

As for the iTunes store, ever heard of Rhapsody? It launched in 2001. iTunes
store was launched in 2003.

~~~
creamyhorror
Wonderful reply. Apple won the smartphone market, and certainly raised overall
ease-of-use standards in the market, but that doesn't mean that smartphones
would have been objectively worse otherwise - just different, possibly better
or worse. We would possibly have much more freedom in terms of app stores.

The fact that Apple stamped its mark on the global phone market and is making
huge profits is absolutely not an inherent reason to be thankful for them.
They won most of the market and now enjoy a massive network effect advantage
(larger market => more developers developing for iOS => improved and cheaper
app offerings => larger market); why respect them for doing the equivalent of
what Facebook did in the social networking arena (make the most popular UX in
the market)?

To be sure, a few companies deserve actual respect - for me, those are the
companies that treat their customers well, are highly socially responsible,
encourage openness, and play fair with all. Even better if they go beyond
immediate profit goals to genuinely drive innovation. Most companies just want
to make a buck by winning the market - nothing wrong with that, but that
doesn't inherently deserve respect.

~~~
LokiSnake
Before the iPhone, the smartphone was still a very niche device though. The
closest thing to mainstream is the BlackBerry, but it was mostly used for
texting and email. There was already a marketplace, but the user experience
was horrible. The web was barely usable. Thing is, everything has been in that
state for quite a while. The smartphone market had a chance to evolve, but it
wasn't really going anywhere.

~~~
freehunter
So we went from having a very low end computer in our pocket in a market that
appealed to the people who really needed a smartphone to having a powerful toy
of questionable real value to the original smartphone audience.

I'm not saying the iPhone didn't change the market. I _am_ saying I don't
believe it changed it for the better, where "better" means improved for the
original smartphone owners. Look at the casualties from the iPhone:
Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm, Nokia. 4 devices made for business, durable
and professional.

Has there been any more substantial advancement in the smartphone market in
the 6 years the iPhone has been on the market than in the 7 years between
Windows Mobile and the release of the iPhone? Sure the iPhone changed the
market... half a decade ago. And ever since, all its influence has brought us
is more of the same.

------
kristovaher
Gosh, some websites still have not realized that they can have mobile
visitors.

~~~
jyap
Dude it works fine on mobile. It's a Tumblr page.

------
sparknlaunch
I heard Adam Lashinsky speak on a recent Stanford Uni podcast. Pretty
remarkable insights on Apple and Steve Jobs. Jobs turned the place into a
pretty unique organisation.

Podcast: <http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2931>

