Apple Execs on Facebook (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Apple Execs on Facebook (2011)

techemails.com

177 pointscocacola1140 comments

I worked on Birthday Cards, one of the apps listed out. Warms my cold pm heart to know that something I worked on was vaguely known about by high level Apple execs.

At the time it was hugely advantageous to have a native app linked to fb, I remember the week where we made it and released v1, we were the #1 app in lifestyle instantly.

This might not be a popular view here, but I'm surprised how professional they are in these exchanges. I would expect a much more visceral discussion on how the other party is trying to bypass paying them, how they can get more money the other way, etc.

Huh? That's what the whole conversation was about. How other parties, Adobe, Google, etc could bypass them if they allowed a new rule that made facebook happy to be a native app.

It's clear their concern was how other parties would get around their walled garden and huge cut they get via their app store.

They've developed a sort of polite code that stands in for more precise/honest wording they would use in person. Execs understand the discoverable nature of email.

This email was shortly after Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt blatantly discussed their illegal wage suppression scheme until Schmidt sent an email saying basically "let's stop emailing about our crimes".

Yeah, I suppose hubris or anger sometimes blinds them to being prudent. I think they really got caught up in "poaching" somehow being the big problem.

Link to this?

This one seems to have the most source material:

https://9to5google.com/2013/01/23/court-docs-reveal-email-ex...

Including the exchange with Schmidt talking about a "paper trail" and thus the preference to "do it verbally". Though that part of the discussion seems Google internal and not between Apple and Google.

https://9to5google.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2013/01/pa...

Thanks!

I'm not an exec, but I've worked with people that make millions in big tech. You just don't get there unless you are fantastically competent at what you do. Pettiness and immaturity really just is an inefficiency that nobody wants to deal with at that level. When the decisions you are making are measured in the 10s to 100s of millions then nobody else will tolerate a second of your emotions. You'll quickly find yourself outside the group of trust if you're not being objective.

This has an accepted caveat that the most powerful one or two people can always throw in some nonsense. e.g. Jobs saying "FeceBook" and just suggesting a quick, unproven solution. When nobody can overrule you it doesn't matter. But the rest of them would get railed for wasting time.

I've also noticed an aspect of group think at that level, people who go against the current philosophy of the group, even if they are unemotional about it, tend to get booted out or fired too.

> You just don't get there unless you are fantastically competent at what you do.

lol, or you convince Softbank to hand you a hundred million dollars. There are some competent people in tech but just because you're an executive doesn't mean you are competent, rational, or even smart.

But convincing SoftBank to give you money is being a good executive.

Poster has a good point. There are all sorts of corporate cultures, but the previous poster is right too, there are many big corps where upper management is hyper competent to an extent most muggles, me included, find it hard to fathom. That doesn't make them infallible at all, but just being able to operate at that level even slightly is shockingly demanding.

I wouldn't call that competence. Conformity would be closer to the truth, but that's not exactly right either. Success in corporate world – or in any large organization – requires that you can ignore your preferences and focus on doing what you are supposed to do. While being good at what you do helps, it's more important to prioritize your role above your person.

That conformity can be a personality trait, or it can be a facade. You usually can't tell the difference. Successful people can be petty and immature behind closed doors, while faking conformity in public.

> Pettiness and immaturity really just is an inefficiency that nobody wants to deal with at that level.

I've seen a lot of docs and written a bunch of docs for higher ups in one of the FAANG companies (one of my docs made it's way to the CEO level). The advice I heard often in reviews was "no weasel words" and "don't interpret the data - assume your audience is smart enough to understand the implications."

One interesting thing that stood out to me is that the lower levels tended to review exactly what was written in the docs while reviews at the VP and SVP level read the docs and used them as launch pads for discussion - it never stuck to the content in the doc. This is likely there's another reason to not inject pettiness in that it doesn't just get in the way of consuming the information, but gets in the way of having the larger discussion that everyone is interested in.

> You just don't get there unless you are fantastically competent at what you do. Pettiness and immaturity really just is an inefficiency that nobody wants to deal with at that level.

I could list dozens of counterexamples. To burn two bridges that nobody will ever need again, Steve Jobs (even before he made Apple into a juggernaut) and Vic Gundotra would like a screaming word with you. I don't know if Musk was petty and immature before he became essential, but it's possible. Or maybe you mean that people can get there without being fantastically competent, but they eventually fail hard.

No they don't. Source: the entire archive of Internal Tech Emails.

Those are not the people at that level.

Which people are you talking about?

CEOs at the biggest companies in the world are not “in that level”?

You should read them, they are very, very interesting.

I'm not sure there's a lot of polite code here. They are knowingly and intentionally killing a Facebook feature so that it can't compete with the app store. It goes to show you how lax antitrust enforcement when such blatantly anti competitive actions go unpunished.

I don't know why that's surprising. Visceral exchanges are a sign of weakness in corporate culture, even internally within companies. I have not seen that universally amongst all countries in the world but it is certainly true in the US.

Well, in the exchange, Jobs says "Fecebooks". I wonder if that was a Freudian slip. :)

Any manager let alone high-ranking exec is instructed (in management training and through many many reminders) not to put anything in writing that they would not want in precisely these types of leaks.

I'm too young to say this with a straight face, but I'll say it regardless: I miss when writing communiques was considered an art in its own right. You were measured socially by how eloquently you wrote letters and missives.

It has become a lost art in the age of email and subsequently texting and instant messaging.

I felt that way too, but now that we have GPT bots, I wonder if the only way I can discern humans from GPT is via the use of ever evolving shorthand.

> All these apps won't be native, they won't have a relationship or license with us, we won't review them, they won't use our APIs or tools, they won't use our stores, etc.

I read this as code for letting business through without paying vig. It's couched nicely in case it comes out in discovery (hey! it did!), but "license" (leverage), "review" (leverage), "APIs" (stickiness), "stores" (30% of sales) - it's a string of words about control and money making.

> I would expect a much more visceral discussion

Is this influenced by the Balmer interview about the iPhone and how he scoffs at it?

Have you seen mafia style organized crime? It's very professional.

Even when people are being threatened bodily harm, it comes across as polite but direct communication.

Offers made in the businesslike spirit of unrefusability.

> So, for example If Adobe comes in with an app that links to new web apps that they promote we need to allow that "app store" in, even worse Google could come up with an app that runs all their 3rd party Chrome web apps and we would need to allow that in too! I don't see why we want to do that. All these apps won't be native, they won't have a relationship or license with us, we won't review them, they won't use our APIs or tools, they won't use our stores, etc.

What a horror - someone won't be using Apple APIs and tools.

This perfectly shows how Apple's ban on other browser engines and all similar restrictions in general are not about security or any other bogus excuses they like to present, but about being anti-competitive lock-in control freaks.

They don’t make that argument at all in the quote you pulled.

The objection could very well be for security reasons.

> The objection could very well be for security reasons.

It could also be for control over users but claiming "security reasons" whenever anyone asks since that has become a "think of the children" topic in tech.

Sure I don’t disagree. My point was that the quote isn’t “proof.”

The thing I took away from this exchange was the total lack of discussion about what’s in the end user’s best interest. What’s best for the user’s experience? It’s all “We want this” and “Facebook wants that” and the end user is just a bystander. Nobody cares what we think or want.

For all these companies’ marketing-talk about how they care so much about the end user experience, the executives don’t seem all that interested.

Do you not think that this would already have been discussed when the policy under discussion was first developed? The rationale for the policy - whatever it is - would have been determined well before this problem arose. There would be no need for these people, who would have been central to those policies, to rehash their reasons in these emails. They already know all the arguments.

Anti-competitive reasons hidden with security excuses is Apple's modus operandi.

Sure I don’t disagree. My point was that the quote isn’t “proof.”

Charging 30% doesn't enhance security.

I’ll let the Google Play Store know.

Definitely let them know. Then they can make their store successful enough so that the android developers stop trying to make iOS android.

Charging a markup on products sold in a store has a long tradition in retail.

Huh? The parent didn't make that claim. The grandparent wasn't making that claim. And I certainly haven't ever heard Apple stating or implying that free apps are less secure than paid apps.

Aka the mob argument

If your store is big you can sabotage your providers: Apple to Facebook.

If your store is small your providers can sabotage you: Google to Microsoft (Windows Phone).

I wonder whom will Apple be begging for more content for their Vision - perhaps Valve?

Big respect to Apple though for inadvertently protecting their customers from web "apps". But times will change...

From the latest WWDC (2023) Apple has actually encouraging web app support. In Safari Version 17:

Added support for web apps on macOS Sonoma. Add any website to the Dock from the File menu or Share Sheet to get to them even faster. Web apps open in their own window, and integrate with system features like Stage Manager, Screen Time, Notifications, and Focus. (68606770) [1]

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-not...

Encouraging support while banning competing browser engines doesn't look like encouraging.

Why? As a web app developer or user, the browser engine is low on my list of priorities.

Browser engine preferences are about far more niche concerns.

As a web app developer your perspective actually makes you desire a monopoly so you only have to test once. But, as a person I don't want that situation at all.

I don’t know a single non-technical end user that even knows what web “engine” powers their browser, let alone cares. This is not something real people remotely think about.

That doesn't mean it doesn't matter or doesn't affect them.

Just because they don’t think about it doesn’t mean it is good for them. (E.g. sugar in almost everything that kids eat).

I didn't say real people...

To me this looks like Apple porting a feature that's existed on iOS for ages. It's one of those features that I imagine is "so obvious, we missed it." It's certainly a much better idea than apps made with Electron.

I mean, "web apps" are just PWAs which iOS, Android(?), and Chrome have all supported for a while now. Still, it's nice to see a better push for web, and it's a bit of a reversal to Apple's historic position on apps (Steve Jobs opposed creating an app store, preferring web apps).

> I wonder whom will Apple be begging for more content for their Vision - perhaps Valve?

If you're talking gaming content for Vision, I think they would go with Sony. They have what seems to be a good partnership. There's official support for the dualsense on apple devices and apple brought AppleMusic to the playstation store. Steve Jobs himself was a fan of Sony[1]

[1]: https://www.kitguru.net/lifestyle/mobile/apple/anton-shilov/...

Sony competes with Vision, since they sell PS VR. I suspect that they wouldn't want to cannibalize sales of their own hardware/platform in order to forge a partnership with Apple.

Except that PS VR is VR, not AR.

My bet is that vision will launch with very few VR or even 3D apps. You probably won’t even be able to view 3D photos in the browser. It’ll be existing native 2D apps projected into a 3D cylinder.

If you’re steering a platform, you want people to use your APIs and tools. I don’t see how that’s controversial. Otherwise, what are you even doing?

It's not about using their APIs and tools. It's about banning competition. That is beyond controversial - it should be illegal.

What they should be doing? Competing on merit. Not pushing lock-in.

You were specifically disdaining Apple’s push to APIs and tools adoption:

“What a horror - someone won't be using Apple APIs and tools.”

Allowing third party also circumnavigates Apple's approval process.

Personally I don't care about giving up choice if it means reduction of spam.

On a similar note, I'm happy Reddit is reducing third party apps.

Prevents spammy reddit apps.

spammy reddit apps?

It's illegal when a company has a monopoly, but otherwise that's the nature of business. The line of thought that 'apple has a monopoly in iPhone software distribution' never seemed very compelling to me since they don't have a monopoly on mobile phones in general.

You are using term "monopoly" in a misleading way there. It should be illegal when it's causing harm to competition and it totally does. It doesn't need to be an absolute monopoly to be a problem. The fact that competition law is toothless today to address it speaks badly about how it's applied, not about this being a non issue.

Apple has enough control on the market to cause harm to it by stiffing Web standards for example without being an absolute monopoly.

> It should be illegal when it's causing harm to competition and it totally does

Banning being mean to your competition, that's a first.

Read what competition law is about. It's not simply about absolute monopoly which is an extreme edge case. It's about harm to competition. Anti-competitive practices totally should be illegal.

> Read what competition law is about

> Anti-competitive practices totally should be illegal

So are there competition laws that make it illegal, or do you wish there were? Are you asking for enforcement? Or are you just hoping for change?

Concepts in current competition law are good enough already. Its enforcement is toothless though. So yeah, I'm asking for enforcement.

If other browsers were allowed Chrome would become an all-platform monopoly and there would no longer be real web standards.

I guess regulators could also antitrust Google in a balancing act.

To be fair, the amount of effort that Apple puts into their APIs is well above the industry standard. Cocoa and Cocoa Touch stand with few peers when it comes to depth, breadth, and quality which has been a big factor in the success of their platforms. They’re some of the few SDKs where if you want to, you can produce a top tier app without importing a single third party library, which is no small feat.

In their shoes, even if the App Store didn’t exist, I’m sure I wouldn’t be all that thrilled to open the floodgates for lowest common denominator apps built with other toolkits that do nothing to leverage what makes the platforms good and unique.

That's never really an excuse for lock-in. If they are so superior, they wouldn't need to worry about developers not using them, right?

Using tools as a way to control developers is just disgusting.

It doesn't matter how good your SDKs and tooling are, there will always be a large number of developers who will instead prefer options they perceive to be cheaper or more convenient. It's the same reason why McDonalds has no problem selling their food when far higher quality options exist.

Outright control is probably overboard yes, but I don't see any reason why a platform maintainer should want to do anything to encourage low-investment apps.

There is a huge difference between encouraging and forbidding. And quality or security in the above case are used as an excuse to hide the anti-competitive intent.

This is an argument to trust developers and business school grads as opposed to a company that I have a 40+ relationship with. If you want developer freedom choose a different platform. Apple is for users and not developers. We all have the freedom to do whatever we want. Why some people choose to constantly rail against a company they think is ridiculous os mystifying. Move on bless some other platform with your gifts.

One should develop for a platform they enjoy.

Not buying this argument. This should be illegal and not excused with "choose a different platform". That's all there is to it.

The thing that surprised me the most is there’s no mention of what makes a better product for the user. It’s all business strategy and scheming to build a silo. I hope regulators obliterate the platform owners.

But then they'd also have to obliterate Microsoft, Google, and who knows what else. This won't happen.

But the user as almost full control of a M$ and google device.

These are not related unless I'm misunderstanding.

Really? Good luck getting rid of Google play services, the mix of core of the operating system and location/ad tracker.

I rabbit-holed to the 2005 "irate call" from Steve Jobs: https://www.techemails.com/p/sergey-brin-irate-call-from-ste...

Does anyone know who was the REDACTED browser expert being recruited by Google?

So many interesting things there. Jobs and Campbell knew each other from Apple antiquity, and both Campbell and Eric Schmidt sat on Apple's board - and Jobs was already ballistic about Android vs. iPhone.

On one hand I understand how Jobs would have been angry about Google trying to poach the Safari team for Chrome, but on the other I completely agree that anti-poaching schemes (as well as non-compete clauses) are harmful to employees and illegal for good reason.

One fair solution for employees would presumably have been to deal with it head on and make competing offers up to the level of the Safari team's actual value to Apple, but companies are rarely enthusiastic about that as it costs them money and encourages other employees to ask for raises and/or to interview at other companies (probably to discover that they are underpaid.)

An interesting possibility would have been for Apple and Google (or Google and Mozilla for that matter) to collaborate more closely on web browsers, although that would have run into problems eventually due to business incentives.

Sadly one of the primary results from Chrome seems to have been the erosion of Firefox's browser share.

> Jobs was already ballistic about Android vs. iPhone.

This was 2005, well before that, which is part of what makes it interesting.

I think this was about the time that Apple picked up the KDE Konqueror browser Webkit platform and reworked it. I seem to recall there being some objections to Apple fulfilling its open-source obligations by tossing a massive patch "over the wall" ...

P.S. quick search result, 2003: https://dot.kde.org/2003/01/08/apple-announces-new-safari-br...

Good catch - should be "subsequently" rather than "already" since this was 2005 and the iPhone didn't come out until 2007. I can imagine Jobs being upset initially by Google trying to poach the Safari team and subsequently even more upset by Android's iPhone-like UI redesign – especially given the presence of Google execs on Apple's board.

> One fair solution for employees would presumably have been to deal with it head on and make competing offers up to the level of the Safari team's actual value to Apple

Money does not solve all problems. Sometimes people leave companies and there is no dollar value that will get them to come back.

I don't think that makes it less important to make fair offers.

Yea, but,not gonna share. What I told Sergey was to tell Steve 'you can't take a person away from a job they love'

I’m betting it was none only but Ben Goodger. There’s no way you guys would have been coping that hard about it otherwise.

Article says the referral of [REDACTED] was made by Ben Goodger.

Ahh

And this is why FB has invested billions in the Metaverse, so they are not at the mercy of a capricious platform.

This thread brings me back the salad days where FB sought to facilitate an ecosystem on their social graph.

This is what nobody sees - they have a thriving marketplace of ads that rivals Google and they did not need to start a hardware business to get it. But they want too and so far it seems they'll burn everything to find their niche in hardware.

They are their own platform.

Amazing to read pages and pages of AppStore rule minutia (Facebook Credits vs. directory-listing vs. heuristics for what links "look like apps") with basically zero regard for user experience (Scott comes closest to this by acknowledging he wouldn't use a completely gutted Facebook app). Everything is about positioning, or what this means with respect to other big players like Adobe if they let this slide, etc. I would have imagined they would have at least been so bought into their own party line that they would have convinced themselves that "We can't allow this because all those apps are junk and we want a pristine experience on the iPad! This is our chance to avoid all that!" But nope, it's all just business.

> they would have convinced themselves that "We can't allow this because all those apps are junk and we want a pristine experience

It's understood, and also mentioned:

"All these apps won't be native, ... we won't review them, they won't use our APIs or tools..."

Why is this titled 2011 when the article was published yesterday?

I know the emails are from 2011 but they're news to people today, not back then.

reading this makes wonder what scott forstall is doing now. I hope he's not completely disgusted by what happened to him at apple and will get back to creating tech. We need people with truely innovative ideas from that era.

Forstall is semi-retired from tech. He's producing Broadway musicals and acting in minor advisory roles.

Haha, nice. I wish him every success.

I'm probably the only one who would go to see iPhone! The Musical but I am sure it would be great.

I don't know exactly what happened to Scott Forstall, or how good he actually was to work with, but in his public presentations he seemed to communicate a clear understanding of Apple's products and their design.

He was the reason the iphone took off along with the hardware. It was truly a thing of beauty and we have gone downhill on ux since.

>I agree - if we eliminate Fecebooks third proposal it sounds reasonable.

>Remove:Tapping on one of these app-related links would (3) link out to Safari otherwise.

That made me sick reading it.

I’m kind of curious how this shook out at the time and then evolved to what the experience is today. That’s kind of missing from just the emails.

Also, aren’t these emails normally deleted with very short retention? How are they showing up in court cases a decade later.

If a person is involved in a court case, they are under document retention and can’t delete anything. All Apple’s execs are likely always under document retention.

I was at Apple, and tons of people were under document retention. Individual contributors too.

Paywall

I find these emails exchanges fascinating and a treasure trove when you consider a company as secretive and influential as Apple.

What I don’t understand is how they used an unencrypted form of communication for such important topics.

? It's not about encryption. These emails were subpoenaed.

Encrypt the email, rotate and delete keys after 18months.

Unlike Google, Apple isn't trying to hide anything (post-High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation)

Or just set a company policy around email retention. Then delete anything older than that?

Apple chose to keep these emails around because the value of the emails was greater than the risk of keeping them.

The company to whom I'm currently contracted has a 2-month retention policy on inboxes and it drives me crazy.

Are they engaged in generally questionable behavior? Otherwise I can’t imagine why they’d have such a short retention policy.

No, and it can be worked around by copying emails to folders, it's just annoying.

Apple is secretive not sneaky they aren’t trying to trick anybody. They are working on human centric computing. They have had human interface guidelines and the preservation of those guidelines is maintained through app review.

I’m sure that some form of side loading will appear soon. My guess is that all the privacy and integration will be held at arms length from the rest of the ecosystem and may just use webkit to access the user data.

Public companies are required by law to retain email for 7 years I believe.

That would explain it. But then again, why not use Signal or something similar for sensitive topics.

Several employees of the world's largest banks actually tried this. Result? Almost $2 billion in fines.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/wall-street-to-pay-1-8-billion-...

That’s interesting, thanks.

Article is paywalled, but how can it be proved they’re using something like Signal? There must be at least some discussion available to be disclosured on request by law? How do they define if the subject is relevant enough to require a formal exchange between executives?

The world of big public companies is fascinating.

I have to imagine any requirements on email retention would apply to signal too, and that your phone with its local plaintext database can be subpoenaed.

The threat model for signal is not to get you out of your legal obligation to comply with court orders.

I don't understand? As long as someone has the relevant decrypted message chain it can be subpoenaed.

Based on what?

https://www.sec.gov/rules/final/33-8180.htm

This is exclusively about audits

The aforementioned Sarbanes-Oxley act, plus the principle of "negative inference" in civil suits which dictates that a court can infer that someone refusing to testify (or destroying evidence) has something to hide. There's no 'plead the 5th' in civil suits.

> Public companies are required by law to retain email for 7 years I believe

Public companies have to keep audit-related communications, but not something like this [1]. It comes more from civil litigation, where the standard of proof is the preponderance of evidence. If I sue you and produce partial records, and you say you deleted everything, that can be used against you.

[1] https://www.intradyn.com/email-retention-laws/

So why not just delete the emails?

How do you recover a deleted unencrypted email?

> What I don’t understand is how they used an unencrypted form of communication for such important topics.

What would encryption have changed? Apple were compelled to produce these as part of Epic v. Apple.

Couldn’t they’ve said they didn’t have the key anymore? Or automatically delete emails after two years or so?

Seems reckless to keep confidential information like that, but I’m not familiar with the legal obligations large companies have, of course.

Yes, they could have lied to the court if they wanted to. That wouldn't have gone well.

That’s not what I’m asking or suggesting

A blanket auto-delete after 2-years policy is reckless from an institutional knowledge POV>

> What I don’t understand is how they used an unencrypted form of communication for such important topics.

How do you know they did? For all we know, this was on an internal mail system that encrypted messages everywhere, except when showing their content to humans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole)

Also, FTA: “[This document is from Epic v. Apple (2021).]”

I think that means they would have been forced to disclose this, even if it were encrypted (“we lost the keys” would be a viable defense to that, but would require a really, really good set of arguments supporting the claim that happened before a court order arrived)

What do you mean? Client to server on both sides is encrypted. I can’t say for sure, but it’s not unlikely to think the emails would be encrypted at rest on the email server.

The server itself is owned by Apple and is fully trusted to be secure by the exec team using it.

How indiscreet. The same thing today would get you fired on the spot.

"--S."

That is one odd signature (from Scott Forstall).

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