Absolute confidentiality – this is the first and most important principle for anyone working at Apple, whether regular employees or senior managers.

No one can deny that Apple is the most popular and attractive technology company in the world. No one can deny that their products always excite tech enthusiasts. But one thing that everyone has difficulty understanding is that Apple is always “cold and distant” towards its customers, even towards its own shareholders.

People who have had the opportunity to work at Apple do not hesitate to describe this as Apple’s somewhat strange “corporate culture”. While all other companies want to get closer to their customers every day through informal communication “channels” such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook… Apple insists on limiting them to the point of maximizing communication with the media, customers and shareholders.

1. Absolute confidentiality

This is the first principle and also the number 1 most important principle for anyone working at Apple, whether a normal employee or a senior manager. Anyone who violates this principle, whether accidentally or just a “small” violation, should be subject to a sanction, usually immediate dismissal. Apple is also one of the few tech companies famous for its tradition of always providing fake news to its employees about its upcoming products.

“They always make other people paranoid about them and that’s a style I’ve never seen in any company.”, revealed Mark Hamblin, an expert who worked for Apple’s touchscreen technology department. The company’s disclosure of the health of CEO and co-founder Steven P. Jobs, who is battling pancreatic cancer and recently underwent a liver transplant, is considered an extraordinary exception.

2. Law of silence

A senior executive currently working for Apple, usually very open and talkative, also “paled” and denied when asked about Mr. Jobs’ health, even after this information was made public in the press last week. “Don’t talk about it, this subject is too sensitive,” the official said.

Secrecy is not just a “strategy” for media relations but has become a characteristic culture of Apple. Employees working on secret projects must go through a series of security doors, have their bags checked and searched, then must enter a unique password for each person to enter their office. All areas of the company’s headquarters are monitored by security cameras.
With products, Apple’s security level is worth being “learned” by intelligence agencies. Only a very limited number of employees authorized to work in the company’s testing department have the opportunity to get their hands on the products before they are officially released to the market. In the test room, each employee can only know the part or detail they are working on, but never everything. Each part must be packaged in a black bag during work. If at any time the product needs to be removed from the bag, the employee working with the product should turn on a red light to warn people not to pay attention to it.

It’s also why almost all Apple employees are as surprised and excited about their new products as the people who wait in line to buy the company’s products.

“I had the opportunity to attend the launch of an iPod product. It’s strange that everyone I know at the company has never seen this product. » Edward Eigerman, a person who spent 4 years working as a systems engineer for Apple, told the story.

Eigerman was fired from Apple in 2005 when his colleague was involved in leaking some sketches of new software to the company’s customers. Although he had no connection to the case, Eigerman was fired because he was a friend of the attacker.

Another former Apple employee also said that Philip Schiller, the company’s vice president and chief marketing officer, regularly held secret internal meetings, but that during these meetings, members were always given information about the company’s structure. ‘business. throw. Before attending the meeting, everyone must sign a confidentiality agreement. All of this wouldn’t be worth mentioning if all of this information wasn’t fake news.

After that, Apple continuously monitored the media to check whether their false information was leaked or not.

Many people, even if they are not Apple employees, have “suffered” because of their secretive culture. 5 years ago. Apple filed a lawsuit against a series of blogs, alleging that they violated trade secret laws as well as “first rights protected by the United States Constitution.” But then the California state court awarded the blogs victory and forced Apple to pay up to $700,000 in legal costs.

Apple was also a plaintiff who repeatedly sued a blog called Think Secret and then became one of the main factors leading to that blog’s shutdown.

But Apple’s “culture of secrecy” faces real challenges as business watchdog experts and federal authorities ask: Is withholding information about the health situation in violation of the law?

Although this question still has no satisfactory answer, most experts agree on one point: the secret has created surprise and enthusiasm among customers for Apple products, but it is a drug which has the opposite effect in most other cases.

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