|
| Wednesday, March 26, 2008 |
|
Wired: Apple is Evil/Genius
March 25th, 2008
Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 7:37 am
Wired Magazine’s Leander Kahney has a cover story on Apple (”How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong” Issue 16.04 ) that’s worth a read. Overall it’s pretty well balanced and fair and has just enough edgy snarkiness to keep you reading.
Kahney takes Apple to task for being the antithesis of Google:
Everybody is familiar with Google’s famous catchphrase, “Don’t be evil.” It has become a shorthand mission statement for Silicon Valley, encompassing a variety of ideals that — proponents say — are good for business and good for the world: Embrace open platforms. Trust decisions to the wisdom of crowds. Treat your employees like gods.
It’s ironic, then, that one of the Valley’s most successful companies ignored all of these tenets.
…by Google’s definition, Apple is irredeemably evil, behaving more like an old-fashioned industrial titan than a different-thinking business of the future. Apple operates with a level of secrecy that makes Thomas Pynchon look like Paris Hilton. It locks consumers into a proprietary ecosystem. And as for treating employees like gods? Yeah, Apple doesn’t do that either. (emphasis mine).
and Jobs for being a tyrant:
Jobs, by contrast, is a notorious micromanager. No product escapes Cupertino without meeting Jobs’ exacting standards, which are said to cover such esoteric details as the number of screws on the bottom of a laptop and the curve of a monitor’s corners. “He would scrutinize everything, down to the pixel level,” says Cordell Ratzlaff, a former manager charged with creating the OS X interface.
Source: ZDNetLabels: Apple |
| posted by Perimbean @ 11:47 AM |
|
|
|
|
|
