Apple fires up its version of Google’s "20% time" | Hacker News Reader

Apple fires up its version of Google’s "20% time"

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112 pointssumukh179 comments

I’m glad Tim Cook is trying new things like this, involving Jony Ive in Human Interface design and becoming more involved in charity. I just wish they’d shitcan the lawsuits and get on with making products. Hopefully the HTC licensing agreement is the beginning of the end of SJ’s “thermonuclear” tantrum.

The only way to beat the competition is to make products that are too difficult and costly to replicate – they already use fairly exclusive materials for their hardware, sophisticated designs and have an unmatched retail chain - now they need to step up in the software department. They have the money but need the inspiration.

"they already use fairly exclusive materials for their hardware"

What, exactly? As someone who has used an iPhone 3, 4S, iPad 3, and many other mobile devices, I'm really struggling to think of a material that is "fairly exclusive" to Apple.

> What, exactly? As someone who has used an iPhone 3, 4S, iPad 3, and many other mobile devices, I'm really struggling to think of a material that is "fairly exclusive" to Apple.

I think he means "fairly exclusive material usage". There's not many high-end smartphones from Samsung/HTC/LG/etc. that have aluminium frames and/or bodies. The new Nexus phone by LG does appear to use glass on the back though, which seems nice.

They have their own aluminum alloy made specifically for the phone. Custom plastics, dyes, colors, etc. They've got enough scale/buyer power to optimize to the n-th.

Not to mention that the A-series processor is Apple only, they get early access to the best screens, etc.

Not to mention they use forging instead of casting for the aluminum bodies, and have their own white paint formula (most manufacturers don't even bother trying to make white devices). Plastic was still the norm for PCs until the "Ultrabook" wave came along.

Not sure the white paint is relevant, there are quite a few white androids (most notably the HTC One X, which in my opinion is the best looking phone on the market).

White paint is probably irrelevant, but the important part is white paint formula. I own One X but it is not as clean-looking white as iPhone or iPad (it looks somewhere around #FFFFF6, if iPhone's white is considered #FFF). It's still a very good looking phone, though.

>Not to mention they use forging instead of casting for the aluminum bodies

Apple currently CNC mills all their aluminum bodies.

They cold forge, laser cut, CNC mill, bead blast, and then anodize them actually - there's many processes that go into making such a product.

And what a shame that the majority of users cover it with a cheap, plastic/rubber case! :\

Haha - this actually goes for most products, but Apple is crazy at this type of thing - buying CNC machines by the 1000s at a time...

To be honest - I think a lot of it isn't the right direction for product design - it's designed to be HARD to implement, so I feel like a flanking maneuver is required in industrial design to start new aesthetics that will drive different ways of manufacturing.

Haha - this actually goes for most products, but Apple is crazy at this type of thing - buying CNC machines by the 1000s at a time...

To be honest - I think a lot of it isn't the right direction for product design - it's designed to be HARD to match, so I feel like a flanking maneuver is required in industrial design to start new aesthetics that will drive different ways of manufacturing that are most accessible than Apple's current methods.

Oops, I was thinking of milling, not forging.

Early access to best screens? Maybe not.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/17/3515158/htc-shows-off-stu...

Yea, well you have to think about what they're optimizing on - I'm sure that you can equal them on some things - but holistically you can't do it for a competitive price. Apple improves where it gives the most bang - and right now they're not really in a "specs war".

They don't play the commodity game - they market on new features, not better - even the better screen was a "First time ever Retina level" where they introduced PPI as a new metric

> I'm really struggling to think of a material that is "fairly exclusive" to Apple.

Elithrar's reply hit the nail on the head, but in some cases they do use some fairly exotic materials. For instance, the bead-blasted high-tensile stainless steel antenna array (iPhone 4 & 4s) and artificial sapphire crystal lens coating on the latest iPhone. Both required new manufacturing processes and a considerable amount of hardware to work at scale.

With the lawsuits, I think too much is made of this. I don't believe it really much affects their ability to make products one way or the other.

I don't know if it is still the case but a few years ago they were the most sued company in the world and prior to the iPhone they were getting hit with a ton of patent suits and trolls.

So, it seems that starting with the iPhone there was a shift in strategy when Apple realized they needed to patent everything possible as a defensive measure.

Perhaps it's lamentable that became a more offensive strategy, but it seems to be swinging back the other way under Tim Cook.

I also agree that it would be nice if they would step up their software game, but don't hold your breath. Apple makes decent OSes but their apps have never been known for their high quality.

There are some hopeful signs though. Although it gets plenty of hate, I think the the slow convergence of OS X and iOS is a good direction. Of course, with Ive now in charge of software design we can at least expect some more aesthetic polish in their software within the next year.

I think their biggest strength is providing a good platform (hardware and OS) for third party developers to shine. However, they seem to have a hard enough time just doing that (more on the OS side), so I wouldn't mind if they dumped more of their app development to focus even more of the quality of their OSes.

> with Ive now in charge of software design we can at least expect some more aesthetic polish

I hope he delivers something more than polish - if he can make the human-machine interface more intuitive/seamless while toning down the visual cruft that would be great.

> their biggest strength is providing a good platform (hardware and OS) for third party developers to shine

Definitely. That seems to be their angle with the iPad mini vs the better spec'd & competitively-priced competition.

>With the lawsuits, I think too much is made of this. I don't believe it really much affects their ability to make products one way or the other.

It may not affect their ability to design their products but it most certainly affects their marketing, image and business relationships. This goes double when it comes to lawsuits against major business partners (like Samsung).

My personal theory is that they just want to keep they're law department sharp. Just in case a real juridical emergency should arise. Having the department sit idle won't do any good. (p.s. this is a joke)

Google's 20% time was great while I was there. Not everyone takes advantage of it (which is a good thing in many cases - you shouldn't force someone to). But it won't be very beneficial at a company as internally locked down as Apple. It only works when there is open communication of ideas internally. Google, for instance, has internal career fairs where you can check out less-well-known projects for 20% or full time opportunities.

I thought that Google didn't really have 20% time anymore.

None of my half-dozen friends at Google have 20% time. I think the common joke that it's "120%" time might actually be accurate.

I don't think it's accurate. Plenty of Googlers have 20% projects they spend 20% of their time on.

20% time is alive and well, but not everyone takes advantage of the opportunity.

FWIW, 20% time was always controversial. I was part of 'the surge' (a big hiring wave that peaked in 2006 and then died off) and a common complaint was the low number employees had 100% time (they could work on what ever they wanted) and high number employees had to get their manager's approval, and their manager only approved it if it was something the manager needed doing.

Given the nature of that particular 'perk' it was really hard to quantify it for the employee handbook. I came to believe that it was a sort of test, kind of like the tests in Starship Troopers where if you did something that clearly was going to be a Google product or feature then you got points for that, but if nobody could figure out what use it would be, you got penalized. And the option was like either +1 point or -10 demerits (i.e. very unbalanced).

So over my four years the strictures on what was or wasn't 'acceptable use' of your 20% time got more and more constrained. I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if the language had morphed into 'if your really a star performer we'll let you pick your next project' rather than the oft misunderstood 20% to do whatever you want.

Right. If you're above the Real Googler Line, then not only do you have 20% time, but no one's going to stop you from spending 100% of your time on your 20%T project... it will delay your promotion if your 20%T project isn't successful, but that's all. Real Googlers don't sweat Perf or worry about getting fired. They only pay attention to managerial demands when life events (such as having a kid) increase their expenses and they could really use a promotion this year. Otherwise, they do whatever they want.

If you're below the Real Googler Line, and most new hires are, your 20%T project is your 80%T project: appease your manager. Nothing else matters, not "performance" in the abstract or doing something great for the company. Forget all those distractions. If you're below the RGL, your job is to please your boss and serve his career goals. "Peer review" won't protect you, either, if you're at a lower level, because no one below Staff is taken seriously as a peer reviewer. (Remember, they aren't Real Googlers.)

The whole story around "Google culture" is based on what Google is like for people above the RGL, but it takes several years to get there, and it's next to impossible if you're not at one of the top 3 or 4 campuses.

The Real Googler Line used to be at the Senior rank, but now it seems to be closer to Staff (and some Staff SWEs seem to be below the RGL). That means that if you come in at the SWE 3 level, you're two promotions away from it, in a company where the average promote rate is about 10-15% per year. Unless you have a star manager who gets his reports promoted like butter, you're wasting your time.

Google needed to grow a pair and fight to protect its culture from all these transplant executives who brought in terrible ideas from other companies with shit cultures. It needed to man the fuck up and make open allocation an official, unassailable plank of the culture. Now it's too late.

> Now it's too late.

I wouldn't go that far.

Google still has 20% time, in the aggregate. About 20% of engineers are Real Googlers and get to work on whatever they want, 100% of the time. The other 80% have one job: appease your manager, because your manager is a SPOF for your whole career. In other words, it's no different from a typical dysfunctional corporation.

Google claims to be a "peer review" driven company, but if you're below the RGL, then the odds are that your peers are too, and then they have no clout and can't protect you from a priapic manager looking to get some bad Perf on.

Senior SWE is the traditional Real Googler Line, but now it's closer to the Staff rank.

Best of luck to the ones "affected" as everyone that I know who works at Apple are already overworked, stressed and being asked to work while on vacation.

Indeed.

Ditto for certain groups at Google (cough android cough).

Either have a dedicated research group, or give people a pass at being 20% less productive at their regular job.

Here's a novel idea.. increase your workforce by 20%? I know, that's just crazy talk. :)

You may want to read "The Mythical Man Month".

You know that part of the reason that Google's interviews are so difficult is that they can hire younger people that have bright minds, no families, and that will work crazy hours?

The side benefit is that they have geniuses working there.

We talked about doing this at my last job, and never did. When I read "...gives a small group of employees 2 weeks or ‘a limited amount of time’ to work on a project outside of their normal responsibilities at Apple", it made me think of the same attitude- the inability to commit to full-on innovation and creativity. Tim Cook, you are a great CEO, but you don't know how to take sufficient risk to get the reward. Everyone should get the 20% time. Don't do anything half-assed, ever. Even better would be to 1-up Google and say that you don't give a flying fuck what your employees do as long as they are innovating for the company and doing what they love to make people's lives better.

We talked about doing this at my last job, and never did. When I read "...gives a small group of employees 2 weeks or ‘a limited amount of time’ to work on a project outside of their normal responsibilities at Apple", it made me think of the same attitude- the inability to commit to full-on innovation and creativity. Tim Cook, you are a great CEO, but you don't know how to take sufficient risk to get the reward. Everyone should get the 20% time. Don't do anything half-assed, ever. Even better would be to 1-up Google and say that you don't give a flying fuck what your employees do as long as they are innovating for the company and doing what they love to make people's lives better.

This is an awesome post. I award you with an Indignation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtCiP8B2xpc#t=7s

Thank you! "Whenever you're ready" is my favorite part.

This sounds suspiciously like the pipeline of new ideas is running dry.

How so? Sounds to me they're just doing something about their "retention of talent" problem, which is surely one of the biggest issues facing Apple today. Giving their developers a little freedom and flexibility is just what they need.

> Giving their developers a little freedom and flexibility is just what they need.

Developers submitting stuff to the App Store could probably benefit from this too...

Yes but you have fewer opportunities to leave for another app store than apple employees have to leave for another company.

But it only really makes much sense if Apple really thinks any of these two-week projects will turn into actual products.

I'd write it up this way: Tim Cook is a remarkable individual, but he's not exactly the fountain of creative ideas that Jobs was (how original those ideas were is an ongoing debate, but nevertheless). I think it's a remarkably introspective move, recognizing weakness and moving to rectify it.

Put another way it's much better than the "strategy" of suing everybody who uses fruit or 4 sided shapes in their products as a hedge against the lack of creative direction from the top.

I just hope they do the sensible thing and are selective about which ideas they actually turn into products. Gil Amelio and Steve Jobs, between the two of them, had to kill off dozens if not hundreds of fringe products that didn't amount for much and destroyed focus.

That's a great point, editing is often just as important as ideas.

Strongly agree with you here. Ideas are a dime a dozen, but the ability to pick the right one at the right time is kind of like having a strong sense of style. It comes more easily to some.

Forgive me if this is pointless cynicism but fountain of creative ideas?

* A music player

* A phone

* A portable computer

Not exactly the most innovative product categories?

Do you remember what phones were like six years ago?

Yes; just like they are now, just with bigger batteries and smaller screens.

Apple 2? Macintosh? Powerbook? Newton?

Didn't that laser printer and the Apple software that became Adobe pretty much create "desktop publishing"?

I've heard a few people talk about hypercard being neat at the time.

Yeah, they did some stuff lately, whatever. But you really have no appreciation for how cool woz's disk drive was? That was pretty amazing.

Dude, that was Apple the company and not Steve jobs doing.

What's wrong with everyone? Steve jobs didn't come up with every darn idea and implemente every darn thing.

You know what John Chambers is awesome. He invented routers, switches, hubs, IP phones, Conferencing systems, Telco switches, things that power practically 50% of the internet all by himself.

You know what, you're right. The newton was Gassée, and jobs probably did nothing with the laser printer.

However, i think stuff like this: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s... indicates Jobs pushed good people to do their best work. The mac wouldn't be the mac without jobs. Neither would the Next cube. Maybe John Chambers is just as involved with every product Cisco makes, but a terrible self promoter.

A horse [and buggy] and a car are in the same product category as well.

Point: Everything can be generalized to the point of it seeming mundane.

Execution and presentation matters, a lot, if Jobs left a lesson to the world that was it.

wow.

Not necessarily. After the iPad micro, the iPad nano, and the iPad pico, we will finally get to the patented glasses, with tiny Arment and Gruber avatars guiding us in our daily lives.

What pipeline of ideas? An iPod? An iPod that became a phone? A phone that grew a few inches into a tablet? Apple has always been an extremely focused company with very few ideas. That was their secret.

Having a tight product line does not beget that Apple has "few ideas". We're talking about an organization known for its public and even internal secrecy in development process. We never see most of the ideas, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

This concept of Bootlegging[1], isn't "Google's" and dates back to the late 1960s. I always think of Post-it notes as the pre-digital poster child for this sort of internal, yet personal, innovation.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootlegging_(business)

Bootlegging is an unnatural term, and has a historically negative connotation. The definition mentions secrecy and unauthorized projects, yet a few paragraphs later awkwardly adds a permitted form.

You seem to have confused a few monkeys tapping on keyboards "collaboratively" for some kind of trustworthy source of definition.

Good thing Kenneth E. Knight introduced the notion bootlegging in 1967; well before the gnomes could ever get their filthy mitts near it.

Try not to let a few control-freaks on Wikipedia desecrate your language more than it already has. You owe them nothing.

The official definition from Knight's seminal paper "A Descriptive Model of the Intra-Firm Innovation Process" [1]:

    "Bootlegging: In some instances the innovator may be able 
    to implement a new idea by keeping the development under 
    cover from the disapproving power in the organization 
    until it is introduced. At that time it may be impossible 
    for the organization to reverse itself."

It's reasonable to consider the authority of a Wikipedia entry, but in this case I believe the maintainers simply modernized "under cover" and "disapproving power".

1: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2351630

Apple is blatantly and abjectly stealing from Google. This is an egregious and shameless flaunting of the thousands of hours of tireless effort and innovation that went into crafting Google's unique and beautiful culture. Pathetic.

/sarcasm

It's only a matter of time before they patent the 20% Time and sue Google for it.

I am coming too late into this article (one day old already...), but here's an observation that stood out for me that I wanted to share here.

Whenever there is discussion on Apple and "invention", I am reminded of this (somewhat) contrarian opinion piece by Gladwell:--

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_...

Punchline towards the end: Then Starkweather had a scheme for hooking up a high-resolution display to one of his new company’s computers. “I got it running and brought it into management and said, ‘Why don’t we show this at the tech expo in San Francisco? You’ll be able to rule the world.’ They said, ‘I don’t know. We don’t have room for it.’ It was that sort of thing. It was like me saying I’ve discovered a gold mine and you saying we can’t afford a shovel.”

He shrugged a little wearily. It was ever thus. The innovator says go. The company says stop—and maybe the only lesson of the legend of Xerox PARC is that what happened there happens, in one way or another, everywhere. By the way, the man who hired Gary Starkweather away to the company that couldn’t afford a shovel? His name was Steve Jobs

Didn't apple use to have an R&D department and one of the first thing Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple was he scrapped it?

Whether or not it was scrapped when he first came back, R&D doesn't seem like a new thing for Apple.

For example, I remember coming across someone working on touch R&D for Apple: http://murderandcreate.com/

From the page:

"In 2007 I started working in research and development at Apple on multitouch hardware. There I spent my time inventing and patenting new touch technologies. Now I lead the Human Interface Device Software Prototype group at Apple."

Yep, Apple had the Advanced Technologies Group. Jobs shut it down partly as a cost savings measure and partly to focus Apple on the NeXT frameworks as its long-term technology foundation.

I am confused: I believe they still have a research lab in Austin that does machine learning (among other things). I also know folks who have interned doing computational linguistics at Apple.

I can't say I disagree with not having dedicated R&D. The notion of having an R&D department is stuck in the 1950's where the geeks and the worker bees didn't mix. Everyone should be able to and be encouraged to innovate.

Instead of version, I think it would be more accurate to say 3.8% time (two out of fifty-two weeks). 20% time would be over ten weeks by my arithmetic. Although I think it's a generous gesture for a mega cap like Apple, I think this is a little silly. At a big company such as Apple can't you gain or lose 3.8% of your day simply by shuffling around your coffee break or gratuitous meeting schedule?

Sounds like a way to give employees leave without actually giving them leave.

4% time, then.

I think all companies should encourage this. When I read this, Bell Labs comes to mind. Bell Labs had a recipe for brilliant innovation and I think all companies should take note!

> Bell Labs had a recipe for brilliant innovation

Government-guaranteed monopoly profits?

Harder to achieve than it looks.

> Government-guaranteed monopoly profits?

They also were forbidden from profiting from a large portion of the work that they did....

If that weren't the case, we wouldn't have GNU.

We wouldn't have OS X as it is today either.

The font on the website is really difficult for me to read - it causes me to overly strain my eyes.

Good for the people who work there but to me this looks like yet another sign where apple is becoming like the "other companies". No longer think different.

I see it more as a sign that "20% time" projects are becoming an employment benefit, particularly important if Apple is competing with Google for some of the same talent.

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