Apple & Good People

One of the benefits of having multiple blogs is that you're writing to different audiences. Here at blogger I don't do a lot of posts and don't have a large number of readers. At Applepeels where I can sometimes get a couple of thousand page views in a day, it is easy to step on someone's toes.

I get challenged a lot on what I say, and a couple of Apple folks have said some really nasty things to me and hidden behind non-existent e-mail addresses. The good news is that my blog at Applepeels now requires valid e-mails and I am moderating it so I can screen the comments that come. I don't have a problem with people who disagree with me, but it is nice to screen out the Apple employees who have trouble accepting the truth and insist on a twisted view of the facts.

Someone recently took offense that I challenged the quality of the sales management of Apple and suggested that there were lots of high quality employees at Apple. There's no doubt that there are some good folks at Apple, but there aren't nearly as many as there were in the old days.

At one time the biggest challenge of an Apple manager was keeping his employees from working themselves to death. People worked with a passion that drove them to excellence. They required almost no management. Today Apple is a world of micro-management. No one trusts the employees to do their job. Some that I know spend close to one third of their time doing reporting.

Unfortunately with a tiny sales force and a customer base unsettled by the upcoming Intel processor change, Apple can ill afford to burden its sales people with unnecessary reporting just to reassure the managers that people know how to fill out excel spreadsheets or SalesForce.com templates.

Folks that think Apple has great employees today have no idea how extraordinary a company Apple was in the early days.