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Comment by cheald | Hacker News Reader

Between this and the Safari story, I'm struck at just how deep Apple's internal secrecy ethos runs. The idea that there is that level of dedication to keeping a project hidden, not just from outsiders, but from almost the entire rest of the company just blows my mind.

It certainly explains how they're able to keep projects secret for as long as they do.

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You know I have almost the opposite take. As important as secrecy is to them, and for how big and rich they are, they seem very sloppy at times. We've seen them tip their hat with user agent strings out of the cupertino offices, shipping retina resources before the retina machine is announced, etc.

Is a culture of secrecy a good thing? Look at Apple Maps, it would clearly have benefited from more eyeballs.

I personally feel that projects can benefit from more input and more opportunity for constructive criticism. That said, I also don't run the largest company in the US, so I'm not sure I'm qualified to make a judgment call there.

I think that Apple tends to be a bit echo-chambery, but they've historically built solid stuff, so it's hard to criticize their development methodology too heavily. It'll be interesting to see how that contrasts with changes in their corporate ethos in a post-Jobs era.

People overplay the Apple Maps card.

There was only ONE thing Apple did wrong with Apple Maps. And that was to not license data far, far more aggressively.

The fact is that Google Maps as an app is buggy, lags terribly and clunky all round. It's the high quality of the data that sets it apart.

I beg to disagree. I was surprised that Apple Maps also get the information granularity completely wrong, that is the amount of data presented at a zoom level. This, and not the data, made the app uttterly unusable for me on a recent trip to Hong Kong. I could either see the overview of the area I was in with no street names for all the minor streets around me, which made it unusable. Or I could zoom in and finally see the smaller street names, but lose all overview. Also unusable. It seems like they could have just copied Gmaps for that... I sure hope they fix it soon.

Try navigating Thailand without any English street names and descriptions. Nothing to do with the Maps language setting, everything to do with the data. Maybe it's been fixed now with a new data set?

There is only ONE thing that a maps product absolutely has to get right, and that's the data. It's the core of the whole product.

It wasn't just some unlucky team working that went down the wrong path and produced a substandard product (Aperture or MobileMe), this was the outright replacement of a product that almost all iPhone users consider a core feature of their device and, at some point during their time with the device, depend on to help them in a confusing situation.

Yeah, well, maybe I'm the only one, but apple maps work fine for me. Massive improvement over the old maps experience. Google regularly got a ton of things wrong, even in urban areas like San Francisco, so I give Apple the benefit of the doubt when it comes to minor mistakes.

Then again, this whole discussion could be related to the fact that Apple users are about 985% more likely to nitpick a product than any other group of people on earth.

Then again, this whole discussion could be related to the fact that Apple users are about 985% more likely to nitpick a product than any other group of people on earth.

Or just that it was vastly wrong in a lot of places that weren't San Francisco. It was missing one of the two major train stations in Sydney for crying out loud.

Within a week of its launch, I used the product in three different cities and multiple less urban locations on the east and west coasts. I had no major problems.

I'm know there were problems with maps, but a lot of the teeth gnashing was/is exaggerated drama. Google routinely places silly things at the corner of Van Ness and Market, because it has no idea where they belong -- you just don't hear about it because nobody nitpicks Google Maps the way they did Apple's launch.

Why are you still upset? It's been months and Google Maps has been out for a while.

Yes, it's a good thing.

Yeah, just look at how that culture of secrecy screwed up projects like the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, Safari... the list just goes on and on.

There's no real knowledge to be gained with this line of questioning. There aren't many companies like Apple which makes it very hard to run controlled studies or do thorough research.

Also the markets they helped define have changed dramatically as a result of their involvement. So many variables... The best we can really say for now is this is Apple's history as known to outsiders. They accomplished these results. Take it as a data point.

Initially I thought that the secrecy was only to shield information from flowing outside of the company but if you dig deeper there is a much more useful side-affect. If you are part of a 4 member team that is working in a 10,000+ employee organization, it is very easy to get lost in the bureaucracy, processes and fooling yourself that being busy is the same as being productive. However, by making your work secret; it effectively limits what you can talk about with other people within the organization and limits other people from butting into it. This allows the 4-member team to focus on their work, talk to one key person at the top to get through large-organization bureaucracies and be as effective as a 4-person startup.

It also indirectly supports how important it is to not have leaks so marketing efforts in the future don't get weakened.

Edit: Forgot a word..

The military calls it "need to know basis". From the perspective of keeping secrets, it would be pretty dumb if you let every PFC in the army access diplomatic cables that had little to do with his actual duties.

'Confidential, Need to know only' would probably be the most common phrase within Apple

'Are you disclosed on <product code name>? Read him in.'

>but from almost the entire rest of the company just blows my mind.

I've worked at Apple before and it wasn't that different to every other large corporation. Excluding obviously the hardware design and critical features. But everything else was par for the course.

EVERY large company has politics and empire building. Especially when you are a multinational and have a driven workforce.

I've only worked at small (<100 employees) companies, so I guess I've just never run into this. It's a little sad to think that you could work alongside someone and have to consider them a threat rather than an ally.

You should look back through the history of http://minimsft.blogspot.com

Microsoft is worse than most because its ranking system actually encourages you to compete within your team not just outside.

In theory that is false, in practice it is less clear (at least to me). The ranking (and subsequent curve fitting known formally as calibration) is done across a level-band (bascially 'job title') across a much wider scope than a single team (i.e. across a division). The idea that your co-workers are actively plotting to somehow take some reward from you come review time is a poor caricature of reality. Does it happen? Possibly, Microsoft is a huge company. Is it common? Not based on my experience and conversations with others in different parts of the company. Anecdotally I have heard 0 credible stories about it from anyone willing to put their name behind it (i.e. I have seen anonoymous posts on minimicrosoft, but more on that in the next sentence). Also minimicrosoft has a clear selection bias as people don't go their to chat about how much they love various aspects of Microsoft culture. Citing that as evidence is like citing a Tobacco company research paper on the effects of smoking, questions on impartiality have to be considered. That said, and as I pointed out in my first sentence, I have no insight into the actual going-ons in stack-ranking meetings, so for all I know it could be horse-trading and petty-politics and curve-fitting on a per-team basis. That would be immensely stupid, and I don't get the impression that accurately models reality, though what the exact granularity between team of 10 and division of a thousand is, I don't know. There are other things about the Microsoft review system to dislike before curve-fitting, but it is certainly up there, and probably the most publically known aspect.

This is impossible to read. Please restructure it in some way that involves paragraphs, fewer parenthesis and doesn't reference it's own sentences.

Sorry it is so hard to read, most of my posts here are casual thought not elaborately structured rhetoric. Rewriting it to better please you is not high on my list of things to do at the moment, so, pass.

I felt the same way as the GP. It's not about better pleasing one person. It's about investing an extra minute or two yourself to save all of the readers a total amount of time that exceeds that. Writing unstructured text in a discussion forum isn't good netiquette.

I made it through. The trick is to breathe and take it one word at a time.

Can't you see that what you cite is exactly the problem? The people in your level band, including the ones in your hallway that you work with every day, are your competition.

I was a dev in Windows from 2008 to late 2011. Many comments from Mini MSFT resonated with me. My review history was never bad, but knowing precisely who in my peer group got more money (by watching title changes) and knowing which talented, hardworking devs got shafted (by private conversations) was really bad for my morale. Every review period I'd reliably see the same set of folks (manager's favorites) get regular title changes for doing crap work, and the same bright hardworking people doing the "real work" would be given some lame excuse (if not outright set up for failure) and told to just reach a little higher next year. It stings.

Never mind the outright stupidity of a system where a theoretical "dream team" of 10 hardworking, talented, best in class individuals would need to have 1 go without a bonus every year.

Maybe they'll be more diplomatic than what I'm writing, but I don't know anyone at Microsoft whose opinion I respect that won't concede these points or admit that there's a problem.

> consider them a threat rather than an ally.

I think that's a cynical view of it. Like your sibling post from Firehed says, it's probably more about "not getting too many cooks in the kitchen" than being territorial, as well as preventing the poison of uninformed public opinion from killing a project before it was released.

I'd speculate that it's less about politics and empires, and more about not getting too many cooks in the kitchen. It's easy to blur the vision for your product when you have opinions coming in from five thousand people, never mind having the entire world speculate and discuss the product that doesn't yet exist.

Think back to May 2007. Remember some of the iPhone mockups people were throwing around? Aside from being largely impractical and stupid, there was clearly no "right" way to do it that was obvious to everyone, as the mocks were so incredibly varied. At some point, you have to make a bet on what the best way to proceed is and go with it, or else you'll spend all day debating and not actually get anything done. That's far easier in small, "secretive" groups.

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