14 DAY TRIAL // It’s no mystery that Apple goes to great lengths to protect its intellectual property and sometimes, especially under Steve Jobs’ watch, they’ve gone to extremes to keep the lid on some projects.
Take, for instance, Robert Bowdidge’s account of the time he worked for the Cupertino giant, as reported by SAI. His wife was, coincidentally, also working in IT.
She was an IBM employee, which forced Bowdidge to keep his lips sealed about those late nights at the office.
“I couldn't tell my wife anything,” he writes in a Quora thread, adding, “she knew I was working in a different building across the street and pulling very late nights, but she didn't know what I was doing.”
“When I had to travel to Manchester UK to work with more of the Transitive folks, she asked to come along. I had to say ‘no way’ – she worked for IBM at the time, and I knew that the project lead would freak at the thought of our chip vendor learning about the move,” writes Bowdidge.
Brian Hoshi, another ex Apple staffer, tries his best to explain the purpose of Apple’s secretive nature.
He’s worked for years at Apple and learned a valuable lesson about succeeding through innovation. The gist of it is that a company which strives for originality must put the same degree of effort into preventing that originality from leaking.
“Having worked at Apple for a few years, I can say that the need for secrecy is mostly ingrained in the corporate culture to create innovative and revolutionary products from within the otherwise bland and evolutionary markets that Apple chooses to compete in,” he says.
And one anonymous person, who either worked or still works for the company founded by the two Steves decades ago, says, “all prototypes are laser marked with serial numbers and tracked by a central tracking system (called iTrack).”
No wonder it's hard to leak an iPhone these days.
“Physical security is also highly prioritized, with prototypes required to be locked up when not in use,” says this person.
“Access to prototypes is also restricted, and the default assumption within the company is that your coworkers do not know what you're working on,” the anonymous person adds.