Ex-Apple engineer talks about what it is like internally before a new product’s launch
8:12 am, January 27th, 2010, John Brownlee
One of the things that’s easy to forget before every big Apple event is that even the vast majority of Apple employees, including people organizing the event, don’t know what Steve Jobs is going to unveil.
This Bloomberg interview with former Apple Senior Systems Engineer Edward Eigerman describes exactly what it’s like to go to an Apple event as an employee without having any more clue than the rest of us what the company has planned.
It’s definitely an interesting watch: Eigerman describes his own experience being a senior executive at Apple and literally having no knowledge of what the iPod would be like up to ninety minutes before it was announced. He says that internally, Apple employees are just as excited about product launches as the rest of us, and follow all the same rumor sites.
But there’s a more negative side to the internal secrecy: Eigerman claims that paranoia is common within Apple, since people worry they might “know too much” about products they aren’t meant to know about.
Eigerman’s an interesting mouth piece for this, since by his own admission, he was fired by Apple for accidentally giving an Apple client a piece of software a week before release. “If Apple finds out” you’re violating their intellectual property policies, intentionally or not, Eigerman says “there’s no turning back.”
[via 9to5Mac]
Posted by John Brownlee in Apple, Apple Tablet, News, iPod | Comment on this article
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And what say you, Mr. Brownlee, as a Cult of Mac-ist, and with your enviable list of published article credentials-backed street cred?
Do you have an opinion on this accusation? I mean it is an important matter and Bloomberg seem to have crossed the line of journalistic integrity with their broadcast handling of this matter…..don’t you think? Do you think btw? Just asking.
Are Apple like the Nazis, or not? Do we get regular expressions of outrage from any of their tens of thousands of employees? So many questions you could have asked. So much scope for a really interesting story.
Does that matter to you as an eminent journalist? As a Mac Cultist then? Or do you not really give a damn one way or the other?
Cult of Mac?
With friends like these ………
chano, on January 27th, 2010 at 11:36 am
Chano, kudos on the spite-filled screed. You pegged me: I don’t give a damn one way or the other if “Apple is like the Nazis.” Mostly because that’s one of the most facile Godwin arguments I’ve ever heard… and as you can see from the author bio that so annoys you, I live in frickin’ Nazitown.
John Brownlee, on January 27th, 2010 at 11:56 am