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employees from working themselves to death. I can remember leaving the office at eight or nine o'clock at night and having to remind very dedicated system engineers that they had families and lives outside of Apple. There have never been enough people at Apple to get the job done well as folks driven to be the best thought necessary. The sales force has always been ridiculously tiny, and I can never remember the System Engineer to Account Executive ratio getting much better than one to two. Yet somehow the job got done, but often at a huge human cost.
Sixty to seventy hours a week was not abnormal for many Apple folks. Sometime starting with the difficult times at Apple in the middle nineties, the culture at Apple started to change. Some of the best people started to leave. Obviously some groups maintained a better grip on the old Apple culture. Still things subtly changed.
As in all organizations the culture also changes individuals, especially in times of difficulty. When Apple was in a survival mode, almost everything controversial was excused as necessary for ensuring the survival of the company.
Changes that came when Steve and his crew took over created a very different relationship between Apple, its employees and customers.
The first was the all pervasive secrecy which often meant that Apple executives would brief customers on "future technologies" yet Apple field employees would be asked to leave the room. From my understanding this is still the rule rather than the exception. I always found it funny that the Cupertino folks wouldn't trust the field people with secrets but the leaks always continued from Cupertino.
The most fundamental change that happened when Steve came back was that there was a tremendous reluctance for many of the executives to travel from Cupertino to field and visit with customers.
In spite of change in attitude in hardware and software, where all of a sudden it was okay to use...