Yeah but there are also senior people whose heads are so far up their butts. Definitely a situation at Apple that gets cargo-culted elsewhere.
The line they walk is in the service of their own egos. Senior people are rarely in possession of the sort of detailed knowledge that is actual valuable IP to steal - that's like, in the documents and code. They want to get chauffeured in a Bentley. [1] They want everyone to hold their breath when they talk. And by the way, Valleywag turned out to be spot on about how good Tim Cook would be and how bad Johnny Ive has turned, based entirely on their attitudes and not their past performance, which was a serious refutation of the entire way that R&D org was oriented and is reflective of the positive shifts Apple is doing today.
Senior people just have ideas, which honestly anyone can guess that Apple is working on an head mounted display, or that they are experimenting with a Siri that can see through the HMD's camera, working on their own bank, etc. etc. So what is there to keep secret? Google is literally working on everything all the time, even and especially ideas that have failed in the past, so there is literally nothing of value you can learn from "What is Google working on?" So the actual economic value of the head of R&D's secrets is very low, their job is to go and recruit and in that case they should really be talking quite openly about what excites them.
What are the odds any of them are like Shigeru Miyamoto, whose body guards brought around shrouds because last time he turned one of his day to day activities into a video game, it made billions of dollars? Slim. Some VP at Apple is not Shigeru Miyamoto. If you were Shigeru Miyamoto you'd go start your own thing. And that's really what I mean by ego, what 55 year old, at the peak of their seniority and career, is really as great as their paycheck and ego says they are, if they aren't you know, telling their amazing ideas to everyone and recruiting people to do their thing?
> What are the odds any of them are like Shigeru Miyamoto, whose body guards brought around shrouds because last time he turned one of his day to day activities into a video game, it made billions of dollars?
An aside, and an unnecessary one, but after reading your [1] reference, I cannot say how happy I am that Thiel was able to shut down Gawker. That reference read like a cheap supermarket tabloid, and the internet is better for Gawker having been destroyed.
The line they walk is in the service of their own egos. Senior people are rarely in possession of the sort of detailed knowledge that is actual valuable IP to steal - that's like, in the documents and code. They want to get chauffeured in a Bentley. [1] They want everyone to hold their breath when they talk. And by the way, Valleywag turned out to be spot on about how good Tim Cook would be and how bad Johnny Ive has turned, based entirely on their attitudes and not their past performance, which was a serious refutation of the entire way that R&D org was oriented and is reflective of the positive shifts Apple is doing today.
Senior people just have ideas, which honestly anyone can guess that Apple is working on an head mounted display, or that they are experimenting with a Siri that can see through the HMD's camera, working on their own bank, etc. etc. So what is there to keep secret? Google is literally working on everything all the time, even and especially ideas that have failed in the past, so there is literally nothing of value you can learn from "What is Google working on?" So the actual economic value of the head of R&D's secrets is very low, their job is to go and recruit and in that case they should really be talking quite openly about what excites them.
What are the odds any of them are like Shigeru Miyamoto, whose body guards brought around shrouds because last time he turned one of his day to day activities into a video game, it made billions of dollars? Slim. Some VP at Apple is not Shigeru Miyamoto. If you were Shigeru Miyamoto you'd go start your own thing. And that's really what I mean by ego, what 55 year old, at the peak of their seniority and career, is really as great as their paycheck and ego says they are, if they aren't you know, telling their amazing ideas to everyone and recruiting people to do their thing?
[1] http://valleywag.gawker.com/apple-design-boss-jon-ive-gets-c...