Do you even know what the word "socialist" means? Or do you mean "authoritarian" or "totalitarian"?
American ignorance about socialism is ruining democracy.
Oops, my bad. You're posting from Hong Kong, a People's Republic of China Special Administrative Region. So you're an expert on Human Rights, Freedom of Speech and all things Democracy. All of us Americans have no clue as to what Democracy is.
Apple was showing the macBook Air for the norwegian press the other day. And it was prohibited to film / take pictures of the apple-peoples faces... Think about that.....
Steve Jobs doesn´t come across as a people-friendly person.
Is not Web2.0, facebook, youtube and the whole lot focused on people-computing ?
This guy's leaving is a downer for Apple and for indy developers. I'd talked to him (by email, as a developer talking to an Apple engineer) and he was always very helpful. And he's absolutely right about what he's saying. But at least that leaves lots of room for indy developers, and I suspect he'll be coming out with some nifty stuff.
Apple's been like this since long before Steve Jobs came back. Why didn't Apple absorb AOL when it was still essentially "AppleLink Personal Edition"? Why did Apple take so long to embrace TCP/IP and the web when they were so far ahead of Windows at the time? Why was Quicktime Videoconferencing left to languish until others ruled the domain? Why does .Mac suck so much? Why do they sue Apple fan sites? Apple just doesn't get online interaction and never has. If it's not email or direct person-to-person IM (and iChat took forever to get right-- it finally seems usable in Leopard) Apple's an also-ran.
Good questions: maybe Apple remains haunted by eWorld! The choice is between building a proprietary walled garden or just facilitating services, like Facebook, on top of their products. At what level shoould they offer those services - through the browser? Social APIs? Should iTunes be reworked into something more like MySpace? I imagine that such a debate is going on somewhere within Apple, but it's disturbing to hear this engineer's opinion that it isn't very urgent.
Whether or not Apple employees can blog seems to me a rather more specific issue.
Oops, my bad. You're posting from Hong Kong, a People's Republic of China Special Administrative Region. So you're an expert on Human Rights, Freedom of Speech and all things Democracy. All of us Americans have no clue as to what Democracy is.
Maybe it's precisely because he's posting from Hong Kong, Special Administrative etc., that he has an interest in these things?
A recently departed Apple senior software developer describes a corporate culture?discourages even official blogging.
Having a number of clients in the Fortune 500, I can't really think of one that allows official blogging. And if you are going to do it, don't attach your moniker to it and don't get caught. And this applies to small companies as well.
The fact that Microsoft has a few 'blog' sites, one has to wonder if they are truly 'blogs' considering that they appear so well structured, linear and particularly staid. Not much off-the-cuff or in commentary form. Certainly not casual. If anything, right out of the corporate manual, sans typos or grammaticals, and the ma(r)kings of the legal department all over them.
Yup, I'm in the same boat. Been using computers for over 25 years now and I have no interest in putting my life on display for the world. Not to mention that I just don't have time to maintain a virtual persona on a half dozen or so social networking sites. I spend my entire day working on computers, so when I want to socialize with others, I get off the computer, give them a call, and go meet for drinks. I find it a lot more gratifying.
I think there is a market for software for journalists, and other creative professionals, but for social networking, it's always going to be a swiss army knife of web apps and app plug-ins to fit the "site du jour". Tie your software to any particular website's interface and it's destined to be outdated in a couple of years. I've already lived through about 2 or 3 rounds of social networking software/sites in the past 8 years (remember Friendster or ICQ anyone)?
So yes, I'm also glad Apple is staying focused on software for professional users and steering clear of the fickle world of social networking.
I agree with a lot of what you are saying, but I believe there is a lot [ A LOT ! ] of people (kids, teenagers, others ) who are absolutely using their computers for social networking. I guess I am too old for some it ( I am 37 )m but my son´s fave application next to games is iChat. And facebok. And youtube. And a bunch of WarCraft forums.
Apple with little interest about people of all ages, colours and sexuality meet on the internet, forming communities and sharing information, is not a good thing.
Business applications will always be available. Us old guys has nothing to fear :-)
I agree with a lot of what you are saying, but I believe there is a lot [ A LOT ! ] of people (kids, teenagers, others ) who are absolutely using their computers for social networking. I guess I am too old for some it ( I am 37 )m but my son´s fave application next to games is iChat. And facebok. And youtube. And a bunch of WarCraft forums.
Apple with little interest about people of all ages, colours and sexuality meet on the internet, forming communities and sharing information, is not a good thing.
Business applications will always be available. Us old guys has nothing to fear :-)
I wonder how much it really matters that Apple supports specific networks. I'm not sure what Apple can offer other than to make sure the computer is solid. As long as Safari is good and standards compliant, it should be fine. Most social network sites of any kind are accessed through ordinary web browsers.
Apple does specifically support at least two non-Apple social networks, one is Flickr on AppleTV, the other is YouTube on AppleTV, iPhone and iTouch. iMovie supposedly supports posting directly to YouTube. The iPhone and iTouch supports most of the ordinary web too.
As to whether employees should be allowed to blog, etc., I can see that they don't really need an official blog, except for that loco Jonathan Shwartz at Sun, I can't say that they are useful or interesting. I really don't think it is Apple's place to deny employees from doing blogs, so long as employees don't talk about their employer or work specifics.
I get the feeling that social network sites are sort of the rock and roll of this generation-- something that people over a certain age, who aren't actively participating, don't really "get".
For the kids that reflexively live their lives on line, in public, it just seems normal and natural. For those of us whose habits were set before My Space et al blew up, it all seems a little fucked up. Like some horrible extension of our overheated media culture wherein ones sense of self is highly contingent on display and seeing yourself reflected back in the media you consume.
I would guess that Jobs has no use for this stuff because that's how it strikes him, or, at least, that he finds it esthetically distasteful in the same way he dislikes TV, and that he doesn't want to go there any more than he wants Apple TV to ever have a DVR or a tuner.
The social networking phenomena is messy and confusing, and it's not at all clear how any of this is going to pan out-- if it's the dawning of the hive mind or just a really complicated form of advertising.
Jobs likes clarity and order and top down structures, so it doesn't surprise me at all that he would reject the Face Book model, for anything Apple does.
That, unfortunately, is a serious limit on Apple in the Jobs era-- its approach to changing the world will always be defined by Jobs' generational idea of what that looks like. Whether it proves to be some evolutionary version of social networking or some convolution we haven't begun to imagine, a genuinely revolutionary, paradigm shifting change in the nature of our digital lives is likely to pass Apple, or at least Steve Jobs' Apple, by.
They can become the de-facto documentation for a solution. Look at MS.
Several solutions lately can only be found in its engineers' blogs rather than the official documentation. Standard maintenance issues shouldn't be in a blog.
Lately I have spent several afternoons looking for things in TechNet only to find the solutions in some engineer's blog. That is ridiculous.
If the blog covers releases and news from a group great but it shouldn't be anything more and if Apple wants to ensure that the message being conveyed is uniform and not use blogs so much the better.
Social Apps -
Obviously, middle/upper management at Apple is adverse to social apps.
Maybe it's because they don't see a revenue stream that can be generated from it.
Maybe it's also because the money needed to support it is too great to justify it. (Facebook - Have they made any money? Don't know since it's a privately held firm, but most think not. Also, its valuation, which most analysts agree, is based on an over-inflated amount paid by MS for a tiny share of the firm.)
Maybe it's because they don't want to expose Apple to the liability of PII (personally identifying information) being exposed by a mistake in the coding. "...many businesses see this increasing load of legislation as excessive, an unnecessary expense, and a barrier to progress." - Wikipedia.
There are numerous reasons for not going down the social app path and if one of them is that it won't produce net income, thanks Apple.
Oops, my bad. You're posting from Hong Kong, a People's Republic of China Special Administrative Region. So you're an expert on Human Rights, Freedom of Speech and all things Democracy. All of us Americans have no clue as to what Democracy is.
It needs to be stressed that tontonnever said Americans (or even, simply, just you) had no clue as to what democracy is.
Tonton's remark was about your misundersanding of the word socialist, which in itself is in no way a contradiction of terms with democracy.
Democracy : a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.
Socialism : a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
Totalitarianism : of or relating to a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state.
And this last definition is clearly the idea you had in mind in your initial statement. It should be noted that your statement was not ridiculed. In fact, most have probably agreed with what you intended to say. But tonton was (and still is) right in stressing that you did not use the right word to express your opinion.
By the way, the antonym of socialism is capitalism. And capitalism does not require democracy to exist.
The fact that Microsoft has a few 'blog' sites, one has to wonder if they are truly 'blogs' considering that they appear so well structured, linear and particularly staid. Not much off-the-cuff or in commentary form. Certainly not casual. If anything, right out of the corporate manual, sans typos or grammaticals, and the ma(r)kings of the legal department all over them.
Who knows. Maybe allowing for this type of activity would open the doors for lawsuits to have more / less merit?
Folks could say "They got it from the horses mouth" to which a judge might say "If you can't control your own employees" "How do you expect to control other folks" or maybe
"Hell, I can't tell where this came from" "There are so many leaks at Apple, what's to say this didn't come from someone at Apple offices and not Appleinsider or ?"?
Could they MAYBE do something, and if so what, likely, but open the door, and you have to deal with what comes in
As much as I sympathise with people who do not enjoy their company policies, I personally don't mind seeing anywhere I work/worked banning all "social network", online chat, and blogging during work time. Because I personally hate those things.
Why don't we just roll back the clock to pre-internet and pre-PC days? Let's do everything by paper?
Social network is part of our evolving culture, for better or for worst, majority of people do find it useful... god forbid, it can be silly, funny and even entertaining.
Apple's strict corporate rules and drove a senior personnel whom work there for 19-yrs should tell you something about the company. Apple may be creating great products, but at this pace, they sure will slowly drive away the people whom help build the company.
If Apple doesn't "get" Social Networking then they are losing out on another Billion dollar market. I mean really how many people do they think really want to produce and edit audio and video as opposed to people that want, no, need a seamless way to manage their communications.
Social apps don't just encompass Facebook and Myspace. You have LinkedIn, Flickr and other more narrowly focused "communities". Apple's communication software as bland as oatmeal with no goodies tossed in. So I can audio chat or video chat with multiple people. So fckn what ..everyone has access to that.
Apple's oblivious view on social networking means they probably have no strategy for Unified Communication/Messaging for OS X in the works. They'll probably realize their screwup when UC blows up and deliver 3 half baked versions and maybe by 2012 we'll have something decent.
I like Apple's success but because they are so secret and there's such a "Cult of Personality" around the company and Jobs they find success initially in areas but it's their staying power that worries me. I'm frankly surprised they've parlayed the iPod into the multiyear success it's had. Normally Apple leads for a bit and then the cheaper horde of options eventually overtake the Apple solution. There is hope yet.
Apple has GOT to round out their software options. Work with people more...embrace the youth of today who use social networking apps more than they're going to use iLife. You can say what you want about Microsoft but I'm not seeing Ford commercials highlighting Apple voice activated technology..oh yeah Apple let their VR software languish.
I want Apple to stop walking around crowing about how cool the company is and start living up to their hype.
.mac is the perfect launchpad for some social networking. You start out small and within the Apple ecosystem and then later make a more significant push outward. Various flavors of Social apps will not go away. The Internet connects business and people and the spoils will go to the victors who help people manage the deluge of data available.
Loose lips sink ships. When Jobs is asked about future products, he says, "Isn't if funny, a ship that leaks from the top?" I don't blame Jobs one bit for closely guarding his company's secrets. I imagine something like a mad scientist (Microsoft) glaring through a gigantic telescope into an ant farm (Apple). Apple nearly died at the hands of lost trade secrets. (Thanks, John Scully.) If I were an employee of Apple Inc., I would keep that history in mind before I thought about discussing anything with anyone.
Wow, I'm an Apple fan but I believe commentators seem to be giving Apple a huge pass on this. Steve Jobs has done a lot of good for Apple, but it's no secret that Jobs has a lot of OCD. Firing someone for suggesting idea's Jobs doesn't like is not an uncommon practice, as well the as aforementioned issues, seems extreme in nature. Apple makes top notch products, but it's not a company I would enjoy employment.
And, for whatever it's worth, I don't care for social networking myself. I have no MySpace or Facebook account and I don't share personal information or photos on-line. If I want somebody to see a picture, I send them an e-mail. I couldn't care less that Apple is not pursuing this; I'd rather they didn't, in fact.
Wouldn't it be great if your address book was being updated by your contacts themselves?
Having a number of clients in the Fortune 500, I can't really think of one that allows official blogging. And if you are going to do it, don't attach your moniker to it and don't get caught. And this applies to small companies as well.
The fact that Microsoft has a few 'blog' sites, one has to wonder if they are truly 'blogs' considering that they appear so well structured, linear and particularly staid. Not much off-the-cuff or in commentary form. Certainly not casual. If anything, right out of the corporate manual, sans typos or grammaticals, and the ma(r)kings of the legal department all over them.
Comments
Do you even know what the word "socialist" means? Or do you mean "authoritarian" or "totalitarian"?
American ignorance about socialism is ruining democracy.
Oops, my bad. You're posting from Hong Kong, a People's Republic of China Special Administrative Region. So you're an expert on Human Rights, Freedom of Speech and all things Democracy. All of us Americans have no clue as to what Democracy is.
Steve Jobs doesn´t come across as a people-friendly person.
Is not Web2.0, facebook, youtube and the whole lot focused on people-computing ?
I am personally not happy to read about this.
Will this be Apple second iTunes moment ?
Zon
Apple's been like this since long before Steve Jobs came back. Why didn't Apple absorb AOL when it was still essentially "AppleLink Personal Edition"? Why did Apple take so long to embrace TCP/IP and the web when they were so far ahead of Windows at the time? Why was Quicktime Videoconferencing left to languish until others ruled the domain? Why does .Mac suck so much? Why do they sue Apple fan sites? Apple just doesn't get online interaction and never has. If it's not email or direct person-to-person IM (and iChat took forever to get right-- it finally seems usable in Leopard) Apple's an also-ran.
Good questions: maybe Apple remains haunted by eWorld! The choice is between building a proprietary walled garden or just facilitating services, like Facebook, on top of their products. At what level shoould they offer those services - through the browser? Social APIs? Should iTunes be reworked into something more like MySpace? I imagine that such a debate is going on somewhere within Apple, but it's disturbing to hear this engineer's opinion that it isn't very urgent.
Whether or not Apple employees can blog seems to me a rather more specific issue.
Oops, my bad. You're posting from Hong Kong, a People's Republic of China Special Administrative Region. So you're an expert on Human Rights, Freedom of Speech and all things Democracy. All of us Americans have no clue as to what Democracy is.
Maybe it's precisely because he's posting from Hong Kong, Special Administrative etc., that he has an interest in these things?
A recently departed Apple senior software developer describes a corporate culture?discourages even official blogging.
Having a number of clients in the Fortune 500, I can't really think of one that allows official blogging. And if you are going to do it, don't attach your moniker to it and don't get caught. And this applies to small companies as well.
The fact that Microsoft has a few 'blog' sites, one has to wonder if they are truly 'blogs' considering that they appear so well structured, linear and particularly staid. Not much off-the-cuff or in commentary form. Certainly not casual. If anything, right out of the corporate manual, sans typos or grammaticals, and the ma(r)kings of the legal department all over them.
Yup, I'm in the same boat. Been using computers for over 25 years now and I have no interest in putting my life on display for the world. Not to mention that I just don't have time to maintain a virtual persona on a half dozen or so social networking sites. I spend my entire day working on computers, so when I want to socialize with others, I get off the computer, give them a call, and go meet for drinks. I find it a lot more gratifying.
I think there is a market for software for journalists, and other creative professionals, but for social networking, it's always going to be a swiss army knife of web apps and app plug-ins to fit the "site du jour". Tie your software to any particular website's interface and it's destined to be outdated in a couple of years. I've already lived through about 2 or 3 rounds of social networking software/sites in the past 8 years (remember Friendster or ICQ anyone)?
So yes, I'm also glad Apple is staying focused on software for professional users and steering clear of the fickle world of social networking.
I agree with a lot of what you are saying, but I believe there is a lot [ A LOT ! ] of people (kids, teenagers, others ) who are absolutely using their computers for social networking. I guess I am too old for some it ( I am 37 )m but my son´s fave application next to games is iChat. And facebok. And youtube. And a bunch of WarCraft forums.
Apple with little interest about people of all ages, colours and sexuality meet on the internet, forming communities and sharing information, is not a good thing.
Business applications will always be available. Us old guys has nothing to fear :-)
I agree with a lot of what you are saying, but I believe there is a lot [ A LOT ! ] of people (kids, teenagers, others ) who are absolutely using their computers for social networking. I guess I am too old for some it ( I am 37 )m but my son´s fave application next to games is iChat. And facebok. And youtube. And a bunch of WarCraft forums.
Apple with little interest about people of all ages, colours and sexuality meet on the internet, forming communities and sharing information, is not a good thing.
Business applications will always be available. Us old guys has nothing to fear :-)
I wonder how much it really matters that Apple supports specific networks. I'm not sure what Apple can offer other than to make sure the computer is solid. As long as Safari is good and standards compliant, it should be fine. Most social network sites of any kind are accessed through ordinary web browsers.
Apple does specifically support at least two non-Apple social networks, one is Flickr on AppleTV, the other is YouTube on AppleTV, iPhone and iTouch. iMovie supposedly supports posting directly to YouTube. The iPhone and iTouch supports most of the ordinary web too.
As to whether employees should be allowed to blog, etc., I can see that they don't really need an official blog, except for that loco Jonathan Shwartz at Sun, I can't say that they are useful or interesting. I really don't think it is Apple's place to deny employees from doing blogs, so long as employees don't talk about their employer or work specifics.
For the kids that reflexively live their lives on line, in public, it just seems normal and natural. For those of us whose habits were set before My Space et al blew up, it all seems a little fucked up. Like some horrible extension of our overheated media culture wherein ones sense of self is highly contingent on display and seeing yourself reflected back in the media you consume.
I would guess that Jobs has no use for this stuff because that's how it strikes him, or, at least, that he finds it esthetically distasteful in the same way he dislikes TV, and that he doesn't want to go there any more than he wants Apple TV to ever have a DVR or a tuner.
The social networking phenomena is messy and confusing, and it's not at all clear how any of this is going to pan out-- if it's the dawning of the hive mind or just a really complicated form of advertising.
Jobs likes clarity and order and top down structures, so it doesn't surprise me at all that he would reject the Face Book model, for anything Apple does.
That, unfortunately, is a serious limit on Apple in the Jobs era-- its approach to changing the world will always be defined by Jobs' generational idea of what that looks like. Whether it proves to be some evolutionary version of social networking or some convolution we haven't begun to imagine, a genuinely revolutionary, paradigm shifting change in the nature of our digital lives is likely to pass Apple, or at least Steve Jobs' Apple, by.
Oops, my bad. You're posting from Hong Kong, a People's Republic of China Special Administrative Region. So you're an expert on Human Rights, Freedom of Speech and all things Democracy. All of us Americans have no clue as to what Democracy is.
It needs to be stressed that tonton never said Americans (or even, simply, just you) had no clue as to what democracy is.
Tonton's remark was about your misundersanding of the word socialist, which in itself is in no way a contradiction of terms with democracy. And this last definition is clearly the idea you had in mind in your initial statement. It should be noted that your statement was not ridiculed. In fact, most have probably agreed with what you intended to say. But tonton was (and still is) right in stressing that you did not use the right word to express your opinion.
By the way, the antonym of socialism is capitalism. And capitalism does not require democracy to exist.
The fact that Microsoft has a few 'blog' sites, one has to wonder if they are truly 'blogs' considering that they appear so well structured, linear and particularly staid. Not much off-the-cuff or in commentary form. Certainly not casual. If anything, right out of the corporate manual, sans typos or grammaticals, and the ma(r)kings of the legal department all over them.
My feelings, exactly ! + 10
Folks could say "They got it from the horses mouth" to which a judge might say "If you can't control your own employees" "How do you expect to control other folks" or maybe
"Hell, I can't tell where this came from" "There are so many leaks at Apple, what's to say this didn't come from someone at Apple offices and not Appleinsider or ?"?
Could they MAYBE do something, and if so what, likely, but open the door, and you have to deal with what comes in
Skip
As much as I sympathise with people who do not enjoy their company policies, I personally don't mind seeing anywhere I work/worked banning all "social network", online chat, and blogging during work time. Because I personally hate those things.
Why don't we just roll back the clock to pre-internet and pre-PC days? Let's do everything by paper?
Social network is part of our evolving culture, for better or for worst, majority of people do find it useful... god forbid, it can be silly, funny and even entertaining.
Apple's strict corporate rules and drove a senior personnel whom work there for 19-yrs should tell you something about the company. Apple may be creating great products, but at this pace, they sure will slowly drive away the people whom help build the company.
...
Just an aside, did you lose your account from inactivity or something? Your user name seems familiar, but you're showing only one post.
Social apps don't just encompass Facebook and Myspace. You have LinkedIn, Flickr and other more narrowly focused "communities". Apple's communication software as bland as oatmeal with no goodies tossed in. So I can audio chat or video chat with multiple people. So fckn what ..everyone has access to that.
Apple's oblivious view on social networking means they probably have no strategy for Unified Communication/Messaging for OS X in the works. They'll probably realize their screwup when UC blows up and deliver 3 half baked versions and maybe by 2012 we'll have something decent.
I like Apple's success but because they are so secret and there's such a "Cult of Personality" around the company and Jobs they find success initially in areas but it's their staying power that worries me. I'm frankly surprised they've parlayed the iPod into the multiyear success it's had. Normally Apple leads for a bit and then the cheaper horde of options eventually overtake the Apple solution. There is hope yet.
Apple has GOT to round out their software options. Work with people more...embrace the youth of today who use social networking apps more than they're going to use iLife. You can say what you want about Microsoft but I'm not seeing Ford commercials highlighting Apple voice activated technology..oh yeah Apple let their VR software languish.
I want Apple to stop walking around crowing about how cool the company is and start living up to their hype.
.mac is the perfect launchpad for some social networking. You start out small and within the Apple ecosystem and then later make a more significant push outward. Various flavors of Social apps will not go away. The Internet connects business and people and the spoils will go to the victors who help people manage the deluge of data available.
Get in the game Apple.
And, for whatever it's worth, I don't care for social networking myself. I have no MySpace or Facebook account and I don't share personal information or photos on-line. If I want somebody to see a picture, I send them an e-mail. I couldn't care less that Apple is not pursuing this; I'd rather they didn't, in fact.
Wouldn't it be great if your address book was being updated by your contacts themselves?
Having a number of clients in the Fortune 500, I can't really think of one that allows official blogging. And if you are going to do it, don't attach your moniker to it and don't get caught. And this applies to small companies as well.
The fact that Microsoft has a few 'blog' sites, one has to wonder if they are truly 'blogs' considering that they appear so well structured, linear and particularly staid. Not much off-the-cuff or in commentary form. Certainly not casual. If anything, right out of the corporate manual, sans typos or grammaticals, and the ma(r)kings of the legal department all over them.
http://blogs.msdn.com/surface/default.aspx
This blog has been helpful in terms of knowing what to expect and what foundational technology to look at.
Is it a social commentary blog? No.
Is it a political blog? No.
Is it a whining blog? No.
It is a technical blog.
This one appears very candid:
http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/default.aspx