Lessons from Inside Apple: Why Focus is Horrifyingly Scary | Hacker News Reader

Lessons from Inside Apple: Why Focus is Horrifyingly Scary

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>"Arguments at Apple are personal and confrontational. This began at the top, and it is part of the company’s culture."

That sounds like a terrible environment.

Doesn't sound too different from Microsoft's alleged "warring project teams" culture.

Maybe. Outright aggressive is sometimes better than passive-aggressive though, which is what many cultures turn into.

It's sounds incredibly controlling, which would explain the lack of freedom on iOS and Apple's various platforms. It's not enough to own the entire ecosystem, anything outside is not allowed to run on the hardware (at least for iOS devices). Great for investors and Apple's bottom line, but horrible for consumers (e.g. this story: http://niederfamily.blogspot.be/2012/06/silencing-of-maya.ht...)

Whether or not Apple's corporate culture is "controlling" (though I don't really understand why you're conflating 'confrontational' with 'controlling' in the first place) does not directly impact whether policies towards consumers are restrictive. Since the two seem related, I can see why you'd slip into that, but your claim is really a non sequitur.

Also, that article is about a patent lawsuit being brought against a third-party software development firm. The plaintiffs probably requested that Apple take down the allegedly infringing app, and they did. Any curator, no matter how strict or liberal their policies, has the freedom to remove potentially patent-infringing content from their marketplace.

(Which, for the record, isn't to say I agree that the patent is legitimate. I really hope the small developer wins.)

Here's just one example of the controlling nature of Apple from the article:

> Andy Miller, who joined Apple as a vice president after Apple bought his mobile advertising company in 2009, asked Jobs if he could join the board of an independent company in a different business than Apple. “What?” Jobs responded. “You’re barely cutting it here,” Jobs said, which Miller understood to be relatively high praise, “and you want to go spend your time helping someone else’s company? I don’t even let Forstall out of the office,” Jobs added, referring to Scott Forstall, Apple’s mobile software chief, a high-ranking and considerably more influential executive than Miller. Needless to say, Miller declined the board membership offer.

What's controlling about that ?

Expecting a board member at a critical time in Apple's turnaround to dedicate 100% of the time to Apple is hardly controlling. In fact I would deem it common sense.

> "I don’t even let Forstall out of the office."

Maybe a joke, but one only a very controlling person could make.

First, 2009 (or later I suppose) was a critical time in Apple's turnaround?

Second, the anecdote in question is about an Apple executive wanting to be a board member somewhere else. Plenty of executives (at companies other than Apple) are board members elsewhere, so Jobs' refusal is at least noteworthy. And since the refusal seems at least partly motivated by limiting an employee's outside interests, that does sound controlling (try replacing the subject of the conversation another professional activity that had a similarly modest time commitment).

It's also worth noting that the executive in question left Apple last summer.

How comes that Apple products are leading in customer satisfaction surveys, if this is horrible for consumers?

Because consumers don't always know what they want. They can be influenced by marketing and word of mouth (as shown in the Vista vs Mojave experiment).

On another point, Facebook is by far the most popular social network, and it can hardly be argued that Facebook's policies are good for the users.

In the same way that McDonalds leads fast food satisfcation survey, despite being undeniably bad for consumers' health.

Nothing wrong with confrontational and arguing your corner but you need to keep it professional and when a decision is made respect the collective.

I bet it's refreshing once you get comfortable working there, but in the beginning it has to be a little intimidating.

legend says Tony Fadell (iPod creator) threatened to quit when SJ wanted to put a x86 processor on the iPad

I believe such an environment can be very important. if you have very good people

Also, it's one thing to stand for your idea agressively, other, to just swear at people.

This is an interesting point. It is valuable to have this kind of engineer instead of a Yes-man.

Steve Jobs was famously difficult. Certainly not the kind of boss I would want. But the turnover in his inner circle was really low. Craig Federighi who on Monday demonstrated the next OS X is a Guy from the old NeXT days. I think Jobs selected people as underlings who were able to stand up to him (sometimes).

According to his biography, he would give an award every year to the employee who stood up to him the best.

It's a terrible environment, but I bet being a supreme court Justice is also a terrible environment. It also brings out profound conclusions and vision.

When Apple says that battery-life is important in mobile devices, they mean it. If Samsung says it, maybe a year later they will turn around and bring out an eight-core phone that you can play a game on for forty-five minutes before having to plug it in again.

Apple isn't just opinionated: it's opinionated on hugely difficult technical issues that don't even exist in the wild yet. (As when they release a new category.) You only get that through violent discourse with egos on the line.

edit: a similar thing happens at Google, but not when it comes to ergonomics or user interfaces and usability with the same hardware devices Apple makes, but instead when it comes to solving certain problems on a massive scale. The result is that Google can't really release a laptop that's as usable as a Macbook in the same domain, and for everyone, and Apple can't really solve the ops issues that it would take to bring out a Google Search competitor. There is huge amount of discourse (of a radically different nature) at both companies.

> When Apple says that battery-life is important in mobile devices, they mean it

No, they don't. They mean battery life is important in mobile devices as long as it doesn't get in the way of making them thin (among other things). After all, the modern smartphone with the best battery life is the Droid RAZR MAXX (soon to be dethroned by its international sibling the Motorola RAZR MAXX, which doesn't have the battery-life handicap of an LTE radio).

Apple would never release a laptop with a 1.5 hour battery (wifi web browsing). an unimaginable number of such laptops are brought out by every major brand other than Apple.

(likewise apple has its standards in a phone, which is not the standard you cite, but not 45 minutes either.).

Apple is opinionated on every part of the user interface and design, on usability and ease-of-use. They then go on to put their money where their mouth is, and practice what they preach. (For the most part.)

It's very hard to find design decisions at Apple that seem to have 0 thought or discussion behind them. This is the norm at other companies.

>It's very hard to find design decisions at Apple that seem to have 0 thought or discussion behind them.

That doesn't mean the result of said thought was good, however:

http://i.minus.com/dQhzPuq2CZUc/264182-apple-mac-os-x-lion-1...

Windows XP didn't ship with a user-level calendar. If Apple had a calendar before 2006, they'd be winning the calendar design front without much effort.

iCal shipped in 2002. They made it ugly in 2011.

There will always be miss-steps. But I don't think you ever achieve great design without being very opinionated. I feel that it helps to edit yourself.

I really hate all these fake textures they are going though.

The 1.5 hour battery laptop serves (for me) an important niche. You see, I don't actually need a laptop. I need a portable desktop with built in battery backup, which is what the 1.5 hour battery laptop is.

Of course, it's entirely within Apple's prerogative to ignore that very niche market (I would if I were them) and it seems to be working well for them, but every odd ball computer configuration you see was created to meet the needs of at least one market. You are not the target market for the desktop replacement laptop. I am.

In college I loved my desktop replacement. This was before wifi was campus-wide, so bringing my laptop to class didn't give me much more benefit than bringing a pad of paper, so the laptop stayed firmly put on my desk all semester. What was really important to me was being able to haul my computer out of the dorm in one trip. A desktop would require multiple trips and would need to be shut down to move (the laptop lasted and hour on battery and 5 hours in sleep mode). A desktop replacement offers almost all the benefits of a desktop, but with a built-in UPS and a one-piece form factor.

Said market needs may exist, but addressing them is not guaranteed to be profitable.

Apple would never release a laptop with a 1.5 hour battery (wifi web browsing)

That's too bad. I use my laptops as portable desktops, seldom away from a plug. So I have to heft around a giant battery because Apple decides that only one usage model is right?

RIM devices have, generally, dramatically more endurance than Apple mobile devices. Apple seriously compromised battery life on the burgeoning smartphone market because they prioritized other things like a nice interface and a bigger screen. They weren't the leaders in battery life, and it's weird that you compare them particularly to Samsung when most Samsung devices have comparable or battery performance.

> That's too bad. I use my laptops as portable desktops, seldom away from a plug. So I have to heft around a giant battery because Apple decides that only one usage model is right?

False assertion. With a Macbook Pro, you get one of the lightest laptops of its size, plus very competitive specs in pretty much all areas. (This goes for the new Retina one as well as the standard one.)

With a Macbook Pro, you get one of the lightest laptops of its size

Samsung series 9 notebook - 2.8lbs.

Macbook Pro - 4.4 - 5.6lbs.

Apple is a remarkable organization, but they are still using the same Intel processors and chipsets, SSDs and wifi chips as everyone else. Where they have a longer battery life it usually is because they filled every crevice with battery, as with the new Retina Macbook Pro. It could have been much lighter if they didn't so intently focus on a 7 hour battery life.

Wouldn't the correct device to compare be the Macbook Air?

You're comparing a 15.4" mobile workstation with a 2.3GHz or 2.6GHz Ivy Bridge Core i7, 16GB of RAM, and a GT650...to a 13.3" notebook with an Intel IGP, a ULV Core i5, and a max of 8GB of RAM. They don't even come close to filling the same role. If you want to compare the MBP 15" to the Series 9 15", you're looking at a ULV Core i5 at 1.7GHz in the Series 9, still a maximum of 8GB of RAM, still a crappy Intel IGP, and it's less than a pound lighter (3.63 lb).

If you want to compare apples to apples, the 13" Air is a much more appropriate comparison to the original machine you were referring to. The Air has a faster processor (and an option to upgrade to an i7) and weighs almost exactly the same (2.96 pounds to 2.9--not 2.8 as you said).

So...you were saying?

Enjoyable response given the fact that you brought up the ridiculous notion that the MBP was the lightest laptop of 'it's size'. Of course you are carefully amending the claims now ("lightest of its size using a 3rd generation core i7 with a nvidia 650M GPU and..."), unsurprisingly, but the original point was one hundred percent wrong.

You were wrongly saying?

I never actually said the lightest laptop of its size, I said it was one of the lightest laptops of its size, and I kind of assumed you wouldn't be disingenuous enough to compare underspecced ultralights with workstation machines.

So I think I'm done with you. HAND.

I'd really like to understand what hugely difficult technical issues you're talking about. Funding the development of a new higher DPI display?

Reliable trackpads, multitouch, battery life, pushing SSDs, unibody enclosures, magsafe, reliable wake-from-sleep, keyboard illumination. And I hope you don't regard the display as a minor accomplishment.

> It's a terrible environment, but I bet being a supreme court Justice is also a terrible environment.

In the books I've read on the topic like _The Nine_, it's sounds like a terrific environment. You are incredibly respected by everyone you meet, you have a light workload which is self-chosen and also extremely important and you can see the consequences of your work without doubt, you work with other highly competent people, you can indulge in things like teaching your pet subject in your offtime and be paid very well for it, you get to select the most talented young lawyers as your staffers, and so on and so forth.

In addition, it appears that in general it's not personal. For example, Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who often strongly dissent from each others' opinions in court, are personal friends outside of court.

Dear god, I would not want to work in this company. I want a job, not a religion.

“High-performance teams should be at each other’s throats” is how one person with relationships with multiple Apple executives summarized the culture. “You don’t get to the right trade-off without each person advocating aggressively for his position.”

How ironic -- when I was at Apple in the 90s, our meetings were scattered creampuff things and this is how I imagined Microsoft would be. Now that I'm at Microsoft it's the other way around . . . :-)

it's interesting how company cultures evolve. i work for google and have a friend at microsoft, and remarked to him once that our team meetings tend to have the underlying theme of "how can we make the user go 'whoa! they did that?!'". he noted that his team meetings tended to be more along the lines of "how can we crush the competition" (not in a monopolistic sense, just a very competitive view of technology). he actually felt that that constant sense of competition made microsoft a more interesting place to work at than google, whereas i really love how google wants to get things right rather than just better than anyone else (that's a side effect). both of us agreed that we would never work at apple, but i can see people of the right temperament thriving in that culture of obsessive secrecy and constant urgency.

Not working on Android or G+. I infer.

Not fixing that typo, because my Android keyboard is insurmountably glitch.

no, working on search. i agree the android and g+ teams have a somewhat different focus, if only because they're attacking entrenched market leaders rather than getting to lead the market.

At my last company we had one project everyone knew was in crisis, but it was 'strategic' and mandated from on high. At one meeting the product manager wanted to focus us on the highest priority issues - it turned out to be a list of more than 10 poorly defined issues. Great job, great people, but management wanted everything and they wanted it now.

Nine months later and I've just finished my probation period at a small, scrappy startup with a very specific market niche. Focus is really hard and it has to be driven by leadership from the top.

My guess is that when things really get critical it is easier for some people not ot focus on them. And not because focus is scary but what you will see when you focus is.

These are the moments where you see if your management consists of (war) leaders or administrators. I say leader for lack of a better word for it. What I have seen is that there are some people that are really good in tough, critical situations and others in the routine day-to-day situations. It's more than just rare that you have both abilities in one person.

Maybe that's why some tribal culture have different leaders for war and peace time.

Yes, the military does this too. It is called situational leadership.

I hope people don't read things like this as advice for things they could recreate at their own companies. There are lots of others way to be successful without being outright mean or vindictive.

I honestly am surprised that there are so many intelligent people who are willing to put up with this sort of environment. I really like Apple products but I'd be out the door in a flat second if I was working there and experienced the kind of culture described. Life is too short.

"Focus is scary. It means not hedging your bets. It means going all-in. If you’re not scared, you’re not focused."

>> If you’re not scared, you’re not focused

I think it's a faulty claim. Doesn't work like this in many fields: science, martial arts, medicine (particularly neurosurgery), etc.

It was said in the context of startups/business.

Say that you'd like to work on two projects - A and B. Atleast one of them needs to succeed or you'll go bankrupt(or something). Now, most people will probably think that if they divide their attention between both projects, they have a higher chance of bringing in some money. The thinking here is "Even if A doesn't take off, B might still bring in some money". So, B is the cushion against failure of A (or vice-versa). But this plan lacks focus - You cannot fully focus on A or B. Removing either improves focus but it also removes the cushion.

That's what he means by getting "scared".

I prefer the martial arts focus. Like in follow through what ever you are currently doing by 100% but be ready to do something different when you done with that. And if what you are currently doing brings you into a good position to do something different no matter if it worked or not it's even better!

The wording doesn't work for me. Say, I own 2 homes and I want to sell 1 to pay debt. I understand that this is my future home and I won't get the other one back. Especially if the places are in different countries. Do I get scared? If not, can I stay focused?

They go overboard with this 'go bankrupt' argument to scare themselves to fight. It is the same as if the surgeons would start thinking 'Oh God, this patient is gonna die if I make a mistake' all the time. I don't see how this can help the patients.

Ribbonfarm has an excellent set of articles on the real world dynamics of organisations (starting with the sociopath/clueless/loser categorisation) but also introduces various kinds of "language" used:

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-i...

"If you’re not scared, you’re not focused" sounds like "Babytalk" - the language that sociopaths and losers use to speak to the clueless - who actually take these statements at face value.

Part I of the series: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...

It's a great, intriguing read - certainly one that was genuinely new and unexpected to me.

I finished to read the whole series so far. And it#s just plain impressive! While you can certainly argue some of its points, you can witness most of the points in real live.

Funny to classify co-wokers and bosses accordingly. or not so fun, that depends... :-)

Certainly one of the best reads on organizational psychology I know.

Sounds like a massive exercise in ball waving ego' nonsense, I am pretty sure this is not how real progress is made... It's not as if anything Apple did was truly original (suit on), they are great finishers but I believe true innovation comes from co-operation.

I fail to see how turning around a company from nearly bankruptcy to the largest in the industry isn't progress.

I meant progress as in 'the idea that the world can become increasingly better in terms of science, technology, modernization, liberty, democracy, quality of life, etc.'

As a matter of interest; what do you think the phone market would look like today if the iPhone hadn't come out. And what about the iTunes Store? Do you think you'd be able to buy a single track from album, yet?

yes

This is how Apple users think, and this article is a prime example of the hyperbole and posturing that is Apple.

Thought: what would we gain from a phone market without the iPhone? You'd be able to buy a phone with a stylus if you wanted (some people do want one) and a phone you can use with gloves or wet hands. Keyboards would be more common (rather than being a very small niche). There might be more mainstream hardware variety, rather than flagship phones all looking exactly alike. We might have seen true pocket computers (this is the road Palm and Windows Mobile were going down) instead of pocket devices. We might not have a concept of "jailbreaking", because smartphones prior to the iPhone were generally not restricted so.

As for the iTunes store, ever heard of Rhapsody? It launched in 2001. iTunes store was launched in 2003.

Wonderful reply. Apple won the smartphone market, and certainly raised overall ease-of-use standards in the market, but that doesn't mean that smartphones would have been objectively worse otherwise - just different, possibly better or worse. We would possibly have much more freedom in terms of app stores.

The fact that Apple stamped its mark on the global phone market and is making huge profits is absolutely not an inherent reason to be thankful for them. They won most of the market and now enjoy a massive network effect advantage (larger market => more developers developing for iOS => improved and cheaper app offerings => larger market); why respect them for doing the equivalent of what Facebook did in the social networking arena (make the most popular UX in the market)?

To be sure, a few companies deserve actual respect - for me, those are the companies that treat their customers well, are highly socially responsible, encourage openness, and play fair with all. Even better if they go beyond immediate profit goals to genuinely drive innovation. Most companies just want to make a buck by winning the market - nothing wrong with that, but that doesn't inherently deserve respect.

Before the iPhone, the smartphone was still a very niche device though. The closest thing to mainstream is the BlackBerry, but it was mostly used for texting and email. There was already a marketplace, but the user experience was horrible. The web was barely usable. Thing is, everything has been in that state for quite a while. The smartphone market had a chance to evolve, but it wasn't really going anywhere.

So we went from having a very low end computer in our pocket in a market that appealed to the people who really needed a smartphone to having a powerful toy of questionable real value to the original smartphone audience.

I'm not saying the iPhone didn't change the market. I am saying I don't believe it changed it for the better, where "better" means improved for the original smartphone owners. Look at the casualties from the iPhone: Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm, Nokia. 4 devices made for business, durable and professional.

Has there been any more substantial advancement in the smartphone market in the 6 years the iPhone has been on the market than in the 7 years between Windows Mobile and the release of the iPhone? Sure the iPhone changed the market... half a decade ago. And ever since, all its influence has brought us is more of the same.

If that was truly better, then it would have won against the iPhone in the market.

Who said anything about better?

Besides, it's a false dichotomy. The best products don't always win, the most popular products win. Popularity can be influenced by marketing and agitprop. And what's better for one market isn't what's better for another market. The problem right now is that the smartphone market only caters to one audience. You can't say that's "better".

There's many ways to turn a profit.

> It's not as if anything Apple did was truly original (suit on), they are great finishers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Gosh, some websites still have not realized that they can have mobile visitors.

Dude it works fine on mobile. It's a Tumblr page.

I heard Adam Lashinsky speak on a recent Stanford Uni podcast. Pretty remarkable insights on Apple and Steve Jobs. Jobs turned the place into a pretty unique organisation.

Podcast: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2931

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