Covert mac

I don’t subsribe to the WSJ, but here is an interesting summary of the company’s culture of secrecy:

“Apple mostly keeps its plans for new products to itself. It rigidly compartmentalises itself so that even its own employees don’t find out about coming products,” the report confirms. “While many tech companies assign internal code names to products, Apple goes a step further. It often gives different departments dissimilar code names for the same product, current and former employees say. If a code name leaks, Apple can more easily track down the department from which the leak originated,” it adds. Lists are kept of staff who know about new products.

Kind of spooky, but this actually hurts Apple’s business with corporations that are potential customers. They don’t know what they are investing in. Apparantly Steve Jobs decided to favor consumers rather than go for corporations–even though corporations are a larger market share.

2 thoughts on “Covert mac

  1. Chris

    He also gets tons of free advertising/PR when his products come out b/c media outlets HAVE to be there to cover it.

    And then there’s the Buzz factor…what kind of a price tag can you put on that? Maybe Freakonomics Man can analyze this for us 😉

    Reply

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