It is about Apple's character

Reading Tom Yager's "Why Apple snubs its open source geeks," brought back many Apple memories.  I could easily paraphrase Tom's comments below and let them serve as a commentary on my experiences as an employee at Apple especially when it comes to customers.

My story got such wide attention because lots of people — whose numbers well exceed that fraction of a fraction who would tinker with or compile an OS kernel — understand why breaking a promise, and saying nothing about it, matters. It’s not about code. It’s about character.

Seventeen of the nearly twenty years that I spent at Apple were some of the best of my life.  I was working with highly committed, very intelligent people. While people rightly credit the return of Steve Jobs as a turning point for Apple products, it was also a turning point for Apple's relationship with customers and partners.  The true partnerships with customers that Apple in previous years had used to test and develop new technologies quickly disappeared.  Many customers were very surprised to find that what had once been very open relationships became closed.  Non disclosures that once helped customers pick the right technology path and stay on course with Apple became a thing of the past.

The true measure of the new Apple was that receiving non-disclosure information became a business decision, not a technology decision.  If a customer came to the table with a huge proposal such as Va. Tech's System X they might get the kimono to open a little.  They might even get some short term attention from Apple, but they would be unlikely to get long term Apple commitment.  Once the marketing buzz disappeared, Apple typically would be on to the next hot product.   

Even bringing a lot of business to the table wasn't a guarantee of a real partnership, as some of Apple partners would tell you if they weren't afraid to speak out.  Not being able to understand future architectures is the kiss of death in the world of super computers and government computing where people have to know that the server they put in a cluster or a submarine this year will be available to replace one the next year.  Engineering and design considerations can't wait until Apple decides to have another one of their surprise announcements designed to thrill the faithful and the media.

Yet many large customers initially fall for the behind closed door promises made by Apple executives hoping to milk the enterprise market while making little real commitment to it.  They fall for Apple because the alternative products really aren't as good as what Apple brings to market when the company is at its best designing great products.

In one of the amazing contradictions of the computer world, Apple's generic, made mostly for consumers product is probably one of the best enterprise computing tools out there.  In spite of security challenges resulting in a few minor problems, Apple is still one of, if not the most secure desktop operating systems around.  Most of us don't want to use SE-Linux so Mac OS X is the best game in town with the exception that Apple owns it and forces you to buy their hardware to run it.

Many of those enterprise customers liked the story of Apple's open source kernel even if they never had any intention of doing anything to the kernel. Many of Apple's presentations talked about the benefits of wide spread peer-review instead of depending company engineers whether they were Apple or Microsoft employees.

I think one of the questions that needs to be answered is whether or not Apple was only interested in open source as a way to create marketing buzz and to speed their development along until they arrived at the point where they felt they could go it alone once again, heading down the default proprietary path that is so close to the real heart of Apple.   If there is one thing thing that never really got excised from the the Apple culture, it is the not invented here syndrome.

Sure Apple can go out and buy industry standard parts, and even sign up to Intel CPUs, but can Apple really be a long term, productive member of the open source world?  I don't pretend to be an expert on this, but I can tell you there was no particular admiration for open source when I was there.  There were individuals at Apple who wanted greater exchange with the open source community, but they were a tiny minority. The biggest delight at Apple came at seeing Linux folks hauling around PowerBooks and using OS X.

After all, OS X software is really is the crown jewel of Apple.  Why wouldn't the company be proud of it but in Apple's own inimitable way, provide only token acknowledgment of community efforts that have made OS X what it is?  Beyond selecting and providing some enhancements for the open source rendering engine KHTML which was used as the basis for Safari and providing some enhancements to CDSA (Common Data Security Architecture) from the Open Group, I cannot think of a lot of significant projects where Apple might have given back to the community.  I know there is Bonjour and probably lots of programming things which just aren't on my radar, but I just don't think it is in the character of the current Apple to give back much of anything even if it is only code.

I would be interested in hearing if I'm wrong about what has gone back to the open source community.  I always thought if Apple was really serious about a partnership with folks in the Linux community they might have done a version of Quicktime for Linux, but there were many at Apple, myself included, who felt that down the road Linux could be serious competition for the some of the technical desktop space that Apple coveted. 

Yet giving back to a community whether it is customers, partners, or employees isn't really part of Apple's culture which is based more on "take" and far less on "give."

You have to remember this starts at the top.  One of the first things Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple was to cancel Apple's matching gifts to charity programs.  Now lots of folks will say that was a financial necessity, but I was there, and there were plenty of things Apple could have cut besides gifts to charity. Lots of small companies, under far more financial pressure than Apple find a way to be generous to the communities around them.

"It is about character" when it comes to dealing with partners, employees, and sometimes customers.  The real Apple can be pretty brutal.

I got a note from an ex-Apple employee the other day. I don't think he'll mind my sharing his thoughts and giving you my spin on a story I'm sure he'll write himself some day.

For fun, I made a list of the people I've known, most are friends, who have left Apple. The vast majority were laid off for no good reason or quit. .... There are 36 names!

I have seen that Apple's culture is designed to shake things up, blow people out, and bring in fresh blood. I also know that most of these people who leave go on to interesting new things.  And yet, looking at the list, these are some of the finest people I've ever known in my life, and it's just a shame and a waste of human resources that these people are no longer with Apple. Most were laid off for not very good reasons...

Apple's approach still seems like a waste of talent.

While my friend and former colleague just had Apple employees in mind, and I could come up with a bigger list than him, I think the greater loss is the community that would and did help Apple over the years.

For a year after leaving Apple, I worked at G3 Systems, which is an excellent small business (HUBzone certified) focused on system integration and interface design.  Interestingly G3 Systems, which is run by Gordon Miller, III, hence G3 Systems, was once an all Macintosh shop.  The core team was from the multimedia world and had its roots in Macintosh multimedia development.  When Apple came out with systems called "G3s," Gordon politely asked if Apple could work out some kind of agreement since "G3" legally belonged to G3 Systems. 

Apple's response was "so sue us."

To make a long story short, G3 got so frustrated that they eventually gave up their Macs and went all Windows.  Of course as is often the case, their business tripled after they left the Apple world.  Federal customers, who once recoiled at the sight of Macintoshes in the hands of G3, felt much more secure once G3 Systems started carrying Windows machines.  It was really Apple's loss because they no longer had a partner to carry their products where Apple didn't have the resources to take them.

As an Apple employee, I always felt that Karelia, the makers of Watson got a raw deal from Apple.  I know there are resellers of Apple products who have felt wronged by Apple in some way or other over the years.

Most of the time, all of us, myself included, having been willing to excuse Apple's behavior because we really love the great products.  I don't know that Apple's behavior is ever going to change, and maybe we don't want it to change, if it is in our selfish interest to keep the behavior that drives the great products.

Yet part of me bought into the whole "computer for the rest of us" argument.  At one time Apple was a computer for a very broad spectrum of users.  I feel the Apple customer base over time lost some of its more interesting members.  OS X and an open source kernel was an important attraction for some key technology movers and shakers and was changing that.  I hope that really isn't lost.

I keep fantasizing that one of these days Apple will figure out a way to have a non-proprietary music format and that OS X will run on ThinkPads, but I don't that is in the cards. That would be out of line for the Apple "take" culture and way too much "give" for Steve.  Of course even Bill is going "to concentrate on giving away his fortune," so perhaps there's still some hope for Steve.

There's a really good article, "Minority Report: Apple staying in the minority?," on Apple market share by Seb Janacek.  It closes with this statement.

That's what really matters to the company's stakeholders and customers. It's not about how big your market share is, it's what you do with it.

Seb might not have had in mind Apple's character, but a lot of us do.

So is Apple a good partner, a good employer, and a good manufacturer?

I may be a little slow at posting comments today, since I'm on the road, but I'll be online in the early afternoon eastern time.

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One last note, which is off topic, but platform related, if you do lots of photo albums like I do, you should really try out ShutterBug by Xtralean Software.  It is one of those products that keep me on the Mac.  While I might be frustrated with dot Mac and iWeb, Shutterbug has become a tool that really helps me easily build customized online albums for my site where I sell mostly mountain sunrise prints.

Comments

[cbeitz]

I hate apple for host of different reasons that are all summed up like this "The worst hardware and customer support I have ever experienced!"

In the last three (years) two Mac's died and I just bought (was forced to buy) a Macbook for my daughter and I could not get it out of the apple store before it broke. It is sitting at the store right now and the apple "genius"(an oxymoron) is trying to diagnose and fix the problem. This has gone on for two days.

Oh and did I say that the apple store told me the Macbook was ready with all my data transfered from an Ibook and when I checked it, nothing had been transfered. Great cusotmer service.

To close out this rant...3 IPod's in three years all broke...my cheap MP3 player from MPIO has not skipped a beat in the same time.

That is why I hate apple!!!!!