“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.
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.
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 . . . :-)