Bad Apple?

Fascinating post from Jens Alfke, a just-resigned Apple employee — read it here. (Thanks to Steve Chazin for the hook-up.)

In this post, Jens reveals his dissatisfaction with Apple’s reluctance to embrace the open source/social software culture. Other "creative differences" causing this 16-year Apple veteran to leave include the lack of individual expression and celebration within the company.

For us outsiders, this post gives us an illuminating (and incriminating) look into the closed cultural ethos at Apple. Here’s a tasty snippet…

“It’s deeply ironic: For a company that famously celebrates individuality and Thinking Different, Apple has in the past decade kept its image remarkably impersonal. Other than the trinity who go onstage at press events — Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive, Phil Schiller — how many people can you name who work for Apple? How many engineers?

It wasn’t always this way. Apple was very open in the beginning, and treated the members of the original Mac team like rock stars, complete with photo layouts in Rolling Stone. Their signatures were engraved in the inside of the computer’s case. Even in my early years there, applications’ “about boxes” proudly listed the names of the people who worked on them. The OS itself had semi-secret easter eggs that listed everyone’s name. The developer Tech Notes were bylined with the names of the individual engineers who wrote them.

Nowadays, unless you’re a vice president, the only time Apple consents to show your name is if you give a talk at the Worldwide Developers’ Conference, a rather pricey annual event.”

SOURCE: Jens Alfke |GONE INDIE

Comments

[Scott White]

I always take these types of post with a grain of salt. Maybe he's just disgruntled or maybe he's on target. Who knows. But if he is on target eventually we'll see the trickle down through Apple's internal (or lack of) branding. You can be the cherry on a sundae to the outside world but if your internal branding is in confilct it will show its scary head eventually.

[Free iPod Touch]

Interesting post my the former employee.

[Tyler Jorgenson]

It really is a sad day when companies forget that without the employees they wouldn't get anything done. For a company that strives to break down barriers they must rely on the brilliance of many minds to accomplish their objectives. Once they forget the talents of the individual I think the entire organization stands on a cracking foundation.

[Dan Schawbel]

Good publicity there. I would love to know what Apple's response is.