Read Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired--and Secretive--Company Really Works for Free Online Page B

now
everyone
is waiting longer. The problem with talking smack is you immediately put yourself on the clock. You almost guarantee public disappointment when the product does not ship as (or when) promised. If you just shut your mouth and let the product speak for itself—once you actually
have
a product—then there’s a much better chance for people to be pleasantly surprised. Some companies understand this. Others clearly do not.

    Secrecy at Apple is strictly enforced from within. Valley engineers love to swap stories about their work, but Apple engineers have a reputation for keeping to themselves. “I’ve had friends who’ve been reprimanded for talking too much,” reported a former engineer. “It’s best in general not to talk about work.” The mentality makes Apple stand out in the tech world. “Fear is palpable there, including among partners,” said Gina Bianchini, a seasoned Valley entrepreneur and longtime Apple watcher who is CEO of Mightybell.com ;, an Internet start-up. (The home page of Mightybell.com wryly states “Handmade in California,” an homage to the bigger company’s tagline “Designed by Apple in California.”) “No company has that level of fear.” In 2011, she explained Apple’s outsider status with an epiphany from TED, an annual tech-industry thinkfest in Long Beach, California, attended by a who’s who of top executives and investors. “One thing I observed this year at TED: The Apple employee population does not circulate within the Silicon Valley ecosystem. Nobody knows anybody at Apple. The Internet people all knoweach other, but Apple lives in its own world. Inside, everyone is so afraid to talk that it’s easier to mix exclusively with each other.”
    Another Valley engineer plays in a regular poker game with a team of Apple employees. The understanding is that if Apple comes up at the card table, the subject will be changed. Being fired for blabbing is a well-founded concern. For example, people working on launch events will be given watermarked paper copies of a booklet called
Rules of the Road
that details every milestone leading up to launch day. In the booklet is a legal statement whose message is clear: If this copy ends up in the wrong hands, the responsible party will be fired.
    Apple goes to great lengths to maintain discipline. “There were just these things that were kept very, very secret,” said a former senior executive. “There was a project we were working on, where we put in special locks on one of the floors and put up a couple of extra doors to hide away a team that was working on stuff. You had to sign extra-special agreements acknowledging that you were working on a super-secret project and you wouldn’t talk about it to anyone—not your wife, not your kids.”
    The stress from such secret keeping becomes too much for some. Jobs made a habit of personally conveying to employees the confidentiality of all-company broadcasts. Recalled one ex-employee: “He’d say, ‘Anything disclosed from this meeting will result not just in termination but in the prosecution to the fullest extent that our lawyers can.’ This made me very uncomfortable. You have to watch everything you do. I’d have nightmares.”
    Visitors are allowed at Apple offices, but they are kept under tight wraps. Some report being shocked at theunwillingness of employees to leave their guests unattended for even a few moments ifonew momen the cafeteria. A tech-industry executive visiting a friend in mid-2011 was asked not to post anything to Twitter about the visit or to “check in” at the popular website Foursquare, which publishes a user’s location. In Apple’s view of the world, simply revealing that someone visited Apple on undisclosed business could lead to divulging something about Apple’s agenda. (One wonders if Apple will discourage the use of its “Find My Friends” feature, added to the iPhone’s software in late 2011, a feature the company described as a