The Apple brain malady

First off, I am not talking about the famed reality distortion field.  Now that my many years at Apple are well behind me,  I can see that "Apple" creates a disorder that seems to affect even Steve Jobs.

It is most obvious outside the company in users (not stockholders) who forget that they are actually consumers of Apple's products.  While I am a consumer of Acura products, and really like them, I don't necessarily defend to the death everything that Acura does.  I would like to see the same quality product from them at a lower price.  It helps my wallet.

With something on the order of $14 Billion dollars in the bank, Apple can probably take care of itself.  Yet we have users who are pleased at Apple's higher prices.  There are even users who will argue that anything that Apple shoves out the door is wonderful, despite some glaring problems in some products.

People will even argue that Apple products never have problems and any other systems are junk.  There is a lot of that "junk" out there running America and the world since there aren't many companies or governments using Macs.

I cannot even count all the managers I had at Apple in almost two decades there. Until the last two years, with only a couple of exceptions, they were all good managers.  There were no exceptions in how they left.  They were all let go or put in a position where they had no choice but to leave.

There were a lot of account executives, product managers, and others that I saw leave over the years.  A very few needed to go, most went for reasons that only a "Catbert type" HR person could ever understand.

As those people left, you learned to turn you eyes and be thankful it wasn't you. Little was said as people learned that the rules at Apple were not exactly clear. Much depended on how close to the inner circle you were and not making any waves.  I am sure it happens at many corporations, but I actually know of people who left other companies on good terms.  That's pretty rare at Apple.

A manager at Apple once told me that I needed to learn how to lie a little more.  I think that was right after I had presented my evaluation of our dealer channel in the southeast US.  I had commented that there were less than twenty quality resellers in the whole region out of hundreds.

It was a problem well known within Apple at the time, but no one would say anything about it for fear of making waves.  It was well before the time of Apple Stores.

While within the company certain things can't be said, the Apple brain disease makes it easy to say whatever you want to a customer.  Even Steve Jobs can say nothing without worrying about the consequences.

When I was director of federal sales, I once took an Apple vice president to visit a very large national lab that at the time had thousands of Macs.  I had warned him ahead of time that the customer was very upset that Apple could not get them first off the line products quickly so that testing and approval for purchase could be done prior to the federal fiscal year end. 

Many federal shops operate on the use it or lose theory so if you order a Mac and it doesn't ship, you have lost those dollars. They also can't order systems until they have been approved. 

It did not take the vice president long to write down that problem and promise to fix it.

After the meeting he ignored any efforts to actually meet his commitment.  It was as if by writing it down, he had handled the problem and no longer needed to worry about it.

I also saw the disorder in Steve Jobs.  One was his decision that there would be no paper brochures at FOSE, the federal trade show and that only Apple software could be shown in the booth.

Many federal agencies don't have access to the wide open Internet, their mail is screened heavily, and they depend on paper to understand products.  FOSE is a place they use to solve that problem. 

There was very little call for iLife in the federal space, but many federal customers were very interested in SAP which Apple used internally.  Unfortunately since it wasn't a shrink wrapped Apple product it could not be shown at our federal show.

While it might now be recognized that Apple is not an enterprise company, at the time in 2004, we were growing our business in federal close to 70% year over year.  We had run FOSE as a field show for a number of years and were shocked at these changes when corporate took it over.

I can also remember a memo before one WWDC keynote.  We were always under pressure to get federal CIOs to fly to Cupertino for the WWDC Keynote.  Of course we never knew what was going to be discussed so having someone justify their trip was a little difficult.

In the end most of the time we hoped we could get permission to invite the CIOs to our Reston office (near Washington) for a live telecast which was always provided to Apple employees.  We even had an executive briefing center in which we could host customers.

Yet we would always get down to the day before the event and not know whether or not we could offer it to customers.  We would have to tell them to hold the time, but understand  we might not be able to do anything.  Not every year was it approved, but one year I got the approval and with it came a copy of an email from Steve Jobs to Katie Cotton.  I can still remember it well.  It was really bizarre.

In it Steve Jobs explains that we are showing the WWDC keynote to some Japanese customers and asks Katie if she sees any problem in letting some key US federal employees view the same keynote?

Then there was the time a request came from our largest federal customer and one of the largest Mac customers in the world.  They were doing their fiftieth anniversary celebration, and they asked if Steve would come and honor them by speaking for a few minutes.  They were less than an hour from Cupertino and offered to have their anniversary event at Steve's convenience anytime during the year.

There are lots of ways to respond to customers and say no, but in spite of this being taken to Steve by three different vice presidents, no one could get him to say yes or no.  After six months I made the decision to tell the customer that Steve couldn't make it.  Of course the "it" was a decision.

I could go on and on with examples like Apple's PR folks wanting to cancel events because only an over subscribed event would get them noticed or Apple paying $20K to participate in an event and then backing out and losing their money because someone from the press might ask a question.

In the end, I think the Apple malady is the desire to appear true to the idea of Apple without questioning any of the details.  The idea of Apple can vary by person, but the controlling influence that it has can make it easy to jettison friends and logical thinking.

Most often it makes the appearance of an event more important than the event itself.

Remaining calm as great employees are shown the door is more important than good people losing their jobs for no good reason. 

Ignoring a federal customer's request makes sense only in the world of Apple because certainly enterprise customers' opinions and complaints fall on deaf ears with no consequence.

On the other hand, another employee can create lots of pain by pointing out someone is bringing up questions that don't need to be asked.

In the end Apple on the inside becomes a self imposed prison from which there is no escape aside from leaving the company. 

Life inside the prison is good as long as you can devote all to Apple and can live in relative obscurity, hidden by distance, function or lack of opinion. Too much success can be dangerous. 

It means self policing of your thoughts and actions to a degree that is hard to imagine unless being part of Apple is the most important thing in your life.

It is a carefully calculated existence that takes a huge mental toll on those who remain at Apple for years. 

You know that you are a part of  a company viewed as a shining example of American success, yet as is the case in many companies, the true costs of success in human terms are far higher than most people want to acknowledge.

Outside Apple I think the zealots are driven by an overwhelming desire that their decision to be an Apple user is not only justified by insanely great products but also by the instant membership in a special brotherhood which has vowed to defend Apple at all costs (even to their own pockets) from all the unwashed pagans who continue to refuse to worship at the altar of Steve Jobs.

The Apple world is a strange one, but fortunately there are some really good people around which make up for those who only see a halo around Cupertino & Steve.

Those who can tell the difference between a great product and something with tacked on features or industry trailing specs that Apple has just thrown over the wall keep me going.

May I be immune from the defenders of iWeb who believe people should only use one computer which of course has to be a Mac.

A post like this will bring out some of the worms in the Apple.  I did a post on one of those worms at my new Word Press blog, Our Technological Infirmity.  Also of some slight relevance is another post I did at my Ocracoke Waves site.

If you are in the neighborhood this weekend, join us for Emerald Isle's 50th birthday celebration.

Here's my Emerald isle Travel Guide to help make the trip worthwhile.

Comments

[John]

I'm not commenting on Apple in particular, but I have seen this and worse at a lot of companies. Simple day to day rationality seems to be the exception to the rule. I think it is very difficult to organize large groups of complicated creatures known as humans. There are all sorts of conditions that arise that siphon off productive energy; endless meetings, lack of decision makers, management by accountants, lack of follow up, lack of accountability.

When discussing this with colleagues we decided that to have a very successful company you didn't have to have a silver bullet, you just needed a group of people who could work together and do what they promised. Your product needs to ship on schedule, work out of the box and do what was promised.

[Sebastian Lewis]

You know something, it's not that complicated. Apple's customers call BS on idiot stories like Apple being the New Microsoft, Apple the Monopoly, Apple the All Powerful, Apple's failing non-failures comapred to real failures, journalism is just a mess. It's not limited to Apple coverage either, political coverage has become a spectator sport of how well the candidate "looks" instead of their integrity or the actual meat in their healthcare or whatever plans.

Journalists make a point out of either praising Apple/Steve Jobs as a God among Gods or accusing Apple of being some huge monsterous monopoly despite the fact that Apple holds a monopoly in none of their products or services, and some bastards like TheStreet and Jim Cramer just spread good ol' fashioned bullshit to try and cashout on the Stock Market as in the following video (you need Flip4Mac installed): http://www.tradeguider.com/gavin_webinar_files/cramer.wmv

The other problem is Microsoft users... there's supposedly a cult around Apple and Macs and indeed there is as Mac users buy into it themselves, but there's also a cult around Microsoft with Windows users justifying their use of Windows, usually with very poor information about what Macs can really do, or sometimes they just make really lame excuses (Marketshare == t3h Superi0r111).

Sebastian

[ocracokewaves]

I absolutely agree about the Windows users.

I have written about a couple of users in our office who could really benefit from a Mac, yet they are petrified of leaving the Windows world even though they aren't Windows experts.

It's like anything but MS would be a death sentence.

We had a person struggling with creating a simple postcard. She was asking my advice on how to do it, and I said why don't you buy a Mac. Doing what you want to do isn't hard on a Mac.

It was like I had asked her to jump off a bridge.

The funny thing is, some of them own iPods.

It is almost like they have a blind spot about what Macs can do.

It they knew how many magazines and newspapers actually use Macs, I think they would be blown away.

Of course I think Apple could be well served by a campaign of "Did you know this was done on a Mac?"

[tgunr]

Very much on the mark! I was also a manager at Apple for many years and being one was very enjoyable. One of the great things about the folks at Apple was for the most part everyone knew what needed to be done in their area of expertise and got the job done. Often under extreme conditions to meet a production schedule or other marketing deadline. Many is the time I have seen my guys pulling all nighters and working very long hours to meet the goals handed down from above.

As a manager, I considered my primary job to be like a bicycle fender and keep the crap off the backs of my engineers to the best of my ability and ensure they had the tools and resources they needed to complete the task.

And I thought my team was doing an excellent job until 2005 when it was decided my department was no longer needed and we could 'apply' for jobs elsewhere in the company or leave. Only two of my team decided to apply to other departments and the rest of us just left when it would have been easy to have transferred my engineers to other teams where their good experience could have been put to good use.

There was simply no good reason for this kind of decision other than the fact my team and I were not necessarily always on the same page as the 'in' crowd and would say 'no' and voice our opinion when we thought a bad choice was being made.

All in all, it was a great ride and I still use a Mac.