The thing is, innovation just doesn't happen in big organisations. The current thinking is that once you get passed about 5-8 people on a project, things become bureaucratic, and innovation stops. Apple's response is classic - don't grow just for the sake of it. They keep their R&D teams small and agile. They always have when Steve has been around.
Something to think about. How many people do you reckon they had on the iPod development team? How much money have those guys earned for Apple. How many of us predicted that an mp3 player would turn out to be Apple's biggest cash cow EVER.
There is only one Jonathan Ives. There is only one Avie Tevenian. Apple already pays both millions. R&D expenditure does NOT need to keep pace with the company's bottom line. One might suggest that in fact the reverse is true.
Perhaps that is tue in corporations. I really don't know. Consider academia, the big spenders are are the big researchers. They produce the lions share of the publications, and products.
NYTimes had an article today titled "Windows is So Slow, but Why." Interesting read, but it had a bit near the end relevant to this discussion of Apple's R&D:
Quote:
Where Microsoft has thousands of engineers on its Windows team, Apple has a lean development group of roughly 350 programmers and fewer than 100 software testers, according to two Apple employees who spoke on the condition that they not be identified.
So there you go. At an average cost of $50k/yr, that's only $22.5M/yr worth of development personnel. I wouldn't have thought Apple could get away with such a small team. I wonder if that includes the application guys as well as the OS X guys.
NYTimes had an article today titled "Windows is So Slow, but Why." Interesting read, but it had a bit near the end relevant to this discussion of Apple's R&D:So there you go. At an average cost of $50k/yr, that's only $22.5M/yr worth of development personnel. I wouldn't have thought Apple could get away with such a small team. I wonder if that includes the application guys as well as the OS X guys.
That's just the OS teams. But it's misleading to a certain extent. Right now, Apple has a much larger development team, due to the Intel work.
Of course, it doesn't include all of the other costs development calls for, including new machines for each of these people.
Comments
Originally posted by demallien
The thing is, innovation just doesn't happen in big organisations. The current thinking is that once you get passed about 5-8 people on a project, things become bureaucratic, and innovation stops. Apple's response is classic - don't grow just for the sake of it. They keep their R&D teams small and agile. They always have when Steve has been around.
Something to think about. How many people do you reckon they had on the iPod development team? How much money have those guys earned for Apple. How many of us predicted that an mp3 player would turn out to be Apple's biggest cash cow EVER.
There is only one Jonathan Ives. There is only one Avie Tevenian. Apple already pays both millions. R&D expenditure does NOT need to keep pace with the company's bottom line. One might suggest that in fact the reverse is true.
Perhaps that is tue in corporations. I really don't know. Consider academia, the big spenders are are the big researchers. They produce the lions share of the publications, and products.
Where Microsoft has thousands of engineers on its Windows team, Apple has a lean development group of roughly 350 programmers and fewer than 100 software testers, according to two Apple employees who spoke on the condition that they not be identified.
So there you go. At an average cost of $50k/yr, that's only $22.5M/yr worth of development personnel. I wouldn't have thought Apple could get away with such a small team. I wonder if that includes the application guys as well as the OS X guys.
Originally posted by Towel
NYTimes had an article today titled "Windows is So Slow, but Why." Interesting read, but it had a bit near the end relevant to this discussion of Apple's R&D:So there you go. At an average cost of $50k/yr, that's only $22.5M/yr worth of development personnel. I wouldn't have thought Apple could get away with such a small team. I wonder if that includes the application guys as well as the OS X guys.
That's just the OS teams. But it's misleading to a certain extent. Right now, Apple has a much larger development team, due to the Intel work.
Of course, it doesn't include all of the other costs development calls for, including new machines for each of these people.