Apple is truly letting its developers and managers move closer and closer to the ‘cluetrain‘ model that Doc, Chris, and David popularized a few years ago (when others said they were stupid and unknowledgeable idiots that couldn’t do any real work or produce anything worth keeping). Apple seems to be encouraging their developers and mangers to ‘talk’ to the public via the internet. This is a large move away from the way Apple seemed to be moving back in the late 90′s when they pulled developer team recognition out of all software (for the uniformed, Apple used to include a ‘thanks’ to developers or at least a list of those that worked on a software project in the about screen of all of their software… heck, they even had all of their employees signatures molded into the case of some of their original hardware).
Examples:
Anyone know of any others?
this post was the inspiration for this post
It’s a conversation.
Since Ken Bereskin is a VP at Apple, I don’t think the existence of his blog supports your point. To a lesser extent, Dave Hyatt’s (excellent) blog doesn’t either– he just moved to Apple from a community where blogging is common. I’ll believe that Apple is embracing this new model when their dev managers start doing this more commonly. I do find it interesting that there are only a small handful of Microsoft bloggers, most of whom work in the .NET or web services teams.
Another Apple employee: Bill Humphries – http://whump.com/moreLikeThis/
And another, Steve Zellers (one of my co-workers in a closely related group): http://radio.weblogs.com/0100012/.