Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [49]
The Secret of Secrecy
In January 2007, a judge ordered Apple to pay $700,000 in legal fees to two websites that had reported details of an unre leased product code-named Asteroid. Apple had sued the sites in an attempt to learn the identity of the person in its ranks who had leaked the information, but lost the case.
Some speculated that Jobs sued the websites to keep the press in line. The lawsuit was seen as press intimidation, a scare tactic designed to deter them from reporting rumors. Much of the public discussion concerned press freedom and whether bloggers have the same rights as professional reporters, who enjoy some protection under laws that shield journalists. This is why the Electronic Frontier Foundation took on the case and turned it into a cause célèbre—to protect press freedom. But from Jobs’s point of view, the case had nothing to do with press freedom. He sued the bloggers to scare his own employees. He was less concerned with gagging the press than gagging staff who had leaked to the press—and anyone who might think of doing it in the future. Apple’s buzz marketing is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and Jobs wanted to check the leaks.
Jobs’s Apple is obsessively secretive. It’s almost as secretive as a covert government agency. Like CIA operatives, Apple employees won’t talk about what they do, even with their closest confidants: wives, boyfriends, parents. Employees certainly will not discuss their work with outsiders. Many won’t even refer to the company by name. Like superstitious theater folk who call Macbeth the “Scottish play,” some Apple employees call it the “fruit company.”
Talking out of school is a firing offense. But many employees don’t know anything anyway. Apple staffers are given information on a strictly need-to-know basis. Programmers write software for products they’ve never seen. One group of engineers designs a power supply for a new product, while another group works on the screen. Neither group gets to see the final design. The company has a cell structure, each group isolated from the other, like a spy agency or a terrorist organization.
In the old days, the information flowed so fast out of Apple that the legendary trade publication MacWeek was known as MacLeek. Everyone, from engineers to managers, was feeding information to the press. Since Jobs’s return, Apple’s 21,000 employees as well as dozens of suppliers are extremely tight-lipped. Despite dozens of reporters and bloggers sniffing around, very little good information leaks out about the company’s plans or upcoming products.
Some of Jobs’s secrecy measures get a little extreme. When Jobs hired Ron Johnson from Target to head up Apple’s retail effort, he asked him to use an alias for several months lest anyone get wind that Apple was planning to open retail stores. Johnson was listed on Apple’s phone directory under a false name, which he used to check into hotels.
Apple’s head of marketing, Phil Schiller, said he’s not allowed to tell his wife and kids what he’s working on. His teenage son, an avid iPod fan, was desperate to know what his dad was cooking up at work, but Daddy had to keep his trap shut lest he get canned. Even Jobs himself is subject to his own strictures: he took an iPod hi-fi boom box home for testing, but kept it covered with a black cloth. And he listened to it only when no one else was around.