I’d encourage everyone to pick up the April 2008 edition of Wired.  They’ve got some interesting articles, as usual.  This month their cover story is the Evil/Genius of Apple written by Leander Kahney–how Apple is winning by going against almost all the Silicon Valley ideals.

For instance Apple maintains strict control over everything it does, rather than opening up its platforms.  They maintain as much secrecy as possible as opposed to telling fans what you’re doing and blogging all over about it.  They play hardball and exploit their market leader status in digital music.  Apple does what it wants and when it wants, and if the users are happy that’s great, if not, too bad (or give ‘em a $100 in-store credit after cutting their recently purchased iPhones by $200).  And most Valley companies foster a peace and love atmosphere with their employees, while Steve Jobs is known to yell and make employees cry.But for all of these downfalls, Apple runs a tight ship and makes amazing products.

By going against the grain they’ve been able to beat out the competition and lure more and more users to their iPod/iPhone and eventually iMac families.  Specifically the article talks of how everyone used to naysay the closed ecosystem that Apple has created, and many claimed (including Wired) that it would be the downfall of the company.  In fact, Apple’s created a three-tired system–hardware, software, proprietary Web aps–which is beating a lot of the competition.

And while many can claim this closed system is a bad idea and “evil”, it happens to be working great for the company.  It also happens to be why I like the company so much.  Granted I don’t work for them, in which case my feelings might be slightly different (I just hate to cry at work), but I buy Apple products for precisely the reason that when I get them home, I just know that they’re all going to work together.  And as a consumer I’m also willing to pay a bit more for that.  It’s worth my money to not waste tons of time messing around and trying to get all the individual pieces to work together.

I wish Apple would break a bit more into the enterprise arena for this exact reason.  I’ve used such a crappy hodgepodge of Windows machines and software in the past that, even working for big “technology” firms, the awful technology I was forced to use day to day kept me from producing the highest quality work in shorter amounts of times.

Definitely pick up the Wired magazine…the article is great and there’s a ton of other interesting things in there as well. 


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