Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

Steve Ruble, who is described in his bio as an evangelist for “the application of Weblogs and RSS in traditional public relations campaigns,” penned a weblog entry yesterday morning that has taken off in the way so many boldly stated but half-baked weblog essays seem to these days (witness the “Rhapsody in Yellow” phenomenon for another example). His core assertion is that Apple’s failure to jump on the corporate blogging bandwagon the way Microsoft and others have will ultimately doom the company.

Whether he’s right about that or not certainly remains to be seen (his pessimism regarding Apple’s financial prospects seems a bit misguided given yesterday’s excellent quarterly report). My personal opinion (mine and mine alone, I should remind everyone) is that developer weblogs can indeed be a valuable channel of communication, particularly where outside developers are concerned, and that they can go a long way toward giving an entity like Microsoft or Apple a human face. I have tried to use my own weblog as a way to share interesting things I’ve learned with other developers, and to, in my own small way, foster a sense of community (it may sound a bit corny coming from someone as low on the totem pole as me, but I really did have that in mind when I organized the WWDC Dinner).

All of that said, there are a number of reasons I think weblogging at Apple should remain the way it is today: informal and non-institutionalized:

• I personally think that every official corporate weblog I’ve ever seen (from Microsoft’s Channel 9 to the Google Blog) has come across as rather contrived and trendy (Why does Channel 9 have a moblog for crying out loud!). As The Corporation reminds us, corporations may be considered “persons” under the law, but it can be a bit grating watching them try to act the part.

• I think Ruble’s notion that “corporate transparency can’t [and, by implication, shouldn’t] be stopped” is not entirely correct. While I do agree that Apple might do better to communicate a little more verbosely in some areas, my feelings about this assertion are mostly summed up by a comment Chris Gervais made on Chuq Von Rospach’s post about Ruble’s article: “While Redmond blogs, Cupertino codes.”

  (Update: I’m not completely sure, but it appears that this bon mot should be properly attributed to that perennial weblog detractor Andrew Orlowski of The Register. It appeared at the end of his Tiger Preview piece.)

  At least since Jobs’ return, Apple has made a practice of underpromising, overdelivering, and never pre-announcing. And, as much as I would have loved to have talked about some of the cool stuff in the works for Tiger before WWDC, I have to say I agree with this approach, both because it allows Apple more freedom to experiment and change strategies without public embarassments like the Longhorn setbacks and changes in scale, and because it prevents competitors from beating Apple to market with inferior knockoffs (witness, for example, how quickly the BuyMusic.com store followed Apple’s announcement of the iTunes Music Store).

• While I agree that feedback is a good thing, I’ve seen what’s happened to David Hyatt’s weblog in the past (remember why he disabled comments?), and I, for one, would not want to see my weblog turned into a bug tracking database. In the past, I’ve considered posting occasional interesting tidbits about OS X updates, but my fear has always been that if I was to do so, my site would quickly become a repository for information about problems people experienced with the update. And I can barely keep up with my email, let alone track bugs through my weblog comments. Large-scale software development requires industrial strength bug tracking like Radar, and a weblog comments system just isn’t up to the task.

In a lot of ways, weblogs (at least developer weblogs) are just a new form of something that’s been around in the form of Usenet or listservs for a long time—the only difference is that now, as Mark Pilgrim has wryly observed, the technical discussion arrives interspersed with cat pictures. This informality is, to me, what makes weblogs so fun and what ultimately makes them kind of an awkward fit for corporate entities. I agree that it would be great for more Apple employees to be webloggers (though far more than Ruble imagines already are) and discuss what they can about Apple, but i agree with Chuq’s conclusion that it’s probably better for everyone if they don’t do so from behind their badges.

As many readers undoubtedly know, there is a longstanding tradition at Apple whereby employees are allowed to put more or less whatever job title they want on their business cards. One of my friends, who works on disc burning, for example, uses the title “Coaster Toaster”; another uses the intriguing designation “Mac OS X Meta Person.” Unfortunately, I didn’t know about this when I came to Apple, so mine are pretty boring. If I ever order new ones, though, I know exactly what they’re going to say: “Informaticien.”

You see, I’ve had a fascination with this particular word ever since a post-collegiate Europe trip some friends and I took in 2001. At one point during said trip, I found myself in Paris, trying desperately to get a police theft report before my train left (insurance purposes—long story). After posing a series of awkwardly phrased French questions to a nearby police officer (at one point I was convinced that he thought I was confessing to the crime), I finally found my way to the local gendarmerie, where they spent a good deal of time figuring out what to do with me before finally tracking down an English-speaking officer.

This nice gentleman asked me a number of questions, one of which concerned my occupation. I volunteered something like “computer programmer,” and then looked eagerly at his computer screen to see how he’d translate it. He put down “informaticien,” which struck me as so much more sophisticiated and, indeed romantic sounding than the ever prosaic “software engineer.” Such a title gives its bearer the aura of some sort of information artist or craftsman, which, corny as it may sound (and as much as stern formalists like E.W. Dijkstra would probably disapprove) is how I often like to think of myself.

My only concern is that I seem to be getting a variety of different translations for the word. Using the various translation services in Watson, for example, gives me: data processing specialist (BabelFish and Lycos), computer (FreeTranslation), and computer scientist (InterTran). Any francophones out there care to clarify whether calling myself an “informaticien” would make me sound like a machine or glorified data entry clerk?

There are a lot of neat things about working for a big, innovative Silicon Valley company, but there are also occasional downsides. One of them is that when you join up, you are often asked to sign an intellectual property agreement that somewhat limits your freedom to pursue your own pet projects. I understand the rationale for this, of course, since intellectual property is a tech company’s most valuable resource, but the damnable Interweb is always filling my head with crazy ideas, and it still frustrates me sometimes that I can’t share some of them with the rest of the world.

Last weekend for example, I decided that I’ve been getting out far too much lately, so I stayed home and coded the bulk of an interesting freeware Cocoa app I’ve been contemplating for some time now. It’s in pretty solid shape at this point, and I’m very excited about it, so ordinarily I would simply unleash my creation upon the waiting blogosphere. Now, though, I would have to think twice about doing something like that.

This is not to say that said app will never see the light of day, of course—just that I have to get permission through the proper channels, who have to agree that my creation doesn’t conflict with the company’s interests. I guess we’ll see what happens…

Since I really appreciated it when people did it for me, I wanted to take a moment to welcome Elke Sisco to her new job: making Apple software safe for German-speakers everywhere. Congrats, Elke—I’m sure Dominik, Frank, and the rest of the German Mac community will appreciate your expertise!

The Apple employee blogosphere is talking this evening about a recent college graduate who emailed a number of us (including myself, Erik Barzeski, Eric Albert, Chuq Von Rospach, and Alexei Kosut) a rather thorough questionnaire asking what it’s like to work at Apple, how we got our jobs, what the interview process was like, etc.

Essentially, the discussion hinges on Eric’s surprise at discovering, through Alexei and Chuqui, that this enterprising young man had sent the exact same email to a number of us. Eric’s problem isn’t so much with providing a little advice (which he did), but rather with the fact that the guy didn’t make it more clear that his was a mass mailing.

My take, for the record, is this: I agree that what our job seeker did was cheezy, but then, so is almost everything else about trying to find a job. Any college career office or “how to get hired” manual will tell you to use similar tactics (deceptive tricks to learn the name of the hiring manager, for example), and I personally think this young man was simply trying to work smarter not harder by harnessing the innate networking power of “social software” (incidentally, I was aware of the guy well before he emailed me—I had seen him asking similar questions of the “Apple Alumni” tribe on Tribe.net!).

(Update: I must have mistaken someone else for the person I’m talking about here, since the job seeker claims never to have visited Tribe.net. Apologies…)

It’s easy, when you’re ensconced in a relatively secure job at a company you love, to forget how frustrating and demoralizing it can be to be a freshly minted college graduate looking for an “in” in this economy. I’ve been on both sides of the table, and I know acutely how difficult it can be knowing that you have the passion and ability to do a job well but not knowing how to get people to even give you the time of day (there was an excellent “My Turn” piece in Newsweek a few weeks ago that explains this problem poignantly). Knowing this, I have a strong tendency to cut people like our boy a fair amount of slack.

Another topic I’ve been meaning to write about—partly because I think it ties into a lot of interesting business issues and partly because, like all webloggers, I feel the irrational need to apologize for the fact that I don’t post every day—is the problem of being a weblogger at Apple. The problem can be stated briefly like this: what happens when the culture that produced the “I’m blogging this” shirt meets the man who used to be known for keeping a “Loose Lips Sink Ships” poster on his office wall?

On the face of it, this issue seems easy to resolve: just don’t say anything confidential on your weblog and you’ll be fine! But the problem isn’t that simple because sometimes it’s hard to draw the line between what needs to be kept secret and what doesn’t. What if I was to remark, for example, that I’d been pulling a lot of late nights at work, or that I was going to be delaying a planned vacation, or that I was being trained in a new programming language? Those things aren’t secrets in themselves, but they might hint at things like product delays, release dates, or strategic directions.

Additionally, the “grassroots” nature of weblogging creates significant problems for companies who need to manage communication with their customers, and Apple is no exception. For example, I had considered doing a post this evening about the newly released 10.2.8 update—a project that has occupied a lot of my time in the last month—but ultimately thought better of it. As much as I would like to formally make note of the first milestone in my time at Apple, there are two things I worry about:

1. The possible misperception that I am making an official announcement for the company.
2. The possible deluge of feedback that would result. David Hyatt’s “Surfin’ Safari” experience is instructive here, as is a recent post by Louis Gerbarg (he’s one of those really smart Apple people I’ve been talking about).

This is not to say, of course, that a company like Apple couldn’t gather useful information through the blogosphere (Eric Blair’s post about the 10.2.8 installer this evening is a good example). I’ve always liked the Cluetrain Manifesto, and thought that its ideal of breaking down the corporate “firewall” and enabling direct communication between business and customer was admirable. Now that I work for Apple, however, I see two problems with it:

1. In the “innovation” business, proprietary information is incredibly valuable, which means some level of secrecy is always going to be necessary. If you doubt that, just think about how quickly Buy.com came up with a cheap knock-off of the iTunes Music Store, and then imagine that they had been tipped off six months earlier.
2. The software development process—particularly the development of something like an operating system—is incredibly complex and calls for careful tracking of bugs and changes. The comments page on a weblog just isn’t going to cut it.

For these reasons, I’m going to have to agree with Louis and the majority of other Apple webloggers, at least for the time being, that the best policy is to think of my job at Apple a lot like Fight Club—and not talk about it.

Speaking of life at Apple, I’ve been meaning to post some reflections on my first month in Cupertino. Fortunately, I’m still here—although I did have a brief moment of terror on the morning of my one month anniversary (Thursday, 9/18) when, upon entering 1 Infinite Loop, I discovered that my badge no longer worked. All I could do was stand there fiddling nervously with the thing while the ubiquitous, eternally suspicious, white-shirted security guys looked on grimly. After what seemed like an eternity, I was told to go to the badge office, where the nice lady, thankfully, furnished me with a working version.

Aside from that, everything has gone swimmingly. My coworkers are a cool bunch of cats who have been very good about making me feel like a part of the team very quickly. I do have to say, though, that I’ve come to feel like a bit of an elder statesman among them. One of these youngsters actually expressed muted shock the other day after discovering I’d reached the advanced age of 25 (actually, 26 next Saturday—hint, hint!).

Which brings me to an interesting observation: if I had to sum up my experience at Apple thus far (at least in a way that wouldn’t run afoul of the dreaded NDA), I would have to say that it feels for all the world like I’m back in college. It’s all there: a “campus,” a cafeteria everyone patronizes constantly until they get desperately sick of it (and, really, even after that), a sort of “quad” where volleyball is played, people who burn the midnight oil and sleep late (one day some guy even crashed on a couch outside my office!), and, of course, parties.

Not that it’s been all fun and games, mind you. Apple employees are nothing if not hard workers, and I’ve been very impressed at the level of commitment shown by everyone from top to bottom to making sure that OS X is the best it can be. The culture is highly oriented toward quality, and, though it’s trite to say so, I think it really shows in Apple’s products.

I would say that my favorite benefit of the job so far has been the opportunity to learn, which is inestimable. The chance to be a part of the development of a whole operating system is rare indeed, and the opportunity to assimilate knowledge from the sheer number of brilliant people Apple employs is even rarer. My group is a great place to learn a lot about a lot of things, and I often feel like an intellectual tourist, just trying to take it all in.

In short, I’m absolutely thrilled to be at Apple, and I’m very much looking forward to what’s ahead. Many thanks to my team and my boss for giving me a chance!