Revealed: The Reason For Apple Tuesdays
One day of the week is more famous than any other for our favourite, fruit-based company. Tuesday. Everything that is anything at Apple is revealed on a Tuesday, and I believe that a recent Fortune article has revealed why Tuesday is the day.
So “Why?” I hear you ask — well it sounds like it’s all due to Apple’s compulsion for perfection: Marathon Monday Meetings.
After topping Fortune’s coveted “Fortune 500″ list, Fortune has run a series of articles on the company, including an extremely interesting read — a rare interview with Mr Jobs himself, where he revealed the following:
“So what we do every Monday is we review the whole business. We look at what we sold the week before. We look at every single product under development, products we’re having trouble with, products where the demand is larger than we can make. All the stuff in development, we review. And we do it every single week. I put out an agenda — 80% is the same as it was the last week, and we just walk down it every single week.
We don’t have a lot of process at Apple, but that’s one of the few things we do just to all stay on the same page.”
Not only does this show why Apple releases everything on a Tuesday - because the final decision as to whether the channels are there for supply, and whether the project is ready or not, is made on the Monday before - but also the compulsion that pushes Apples products to perfection. There is no other company that does this; some may have good reviewing procedures, but I seriously doubt that any corporations the size of Apple have the senior team, including the CEO, review every product, every week.
That’s not all that came out of the Fortune article, which is well worth a read; we also find that Jobs is not worried about an Apple without him — it seems he is moulding Tim Cook(COO) for the job. If you’re not in the top 100 people at Apple it’s unlikely you’ll ever work with Jobs himself; and that OS X is definitely at the centre of Apples strategy.
If nothing else the article delves a little deeper into how Apple’s drive for perfection works, and it is best explained by the man himself:
“Take the iPhone. We had a different enclosure design for this iPhone until way too close to the introduction to ever change it. And I came in one Monday morning, I said, ‘I just don’t love this. I can’t convince myself to fall in love with this. And this is the most important product we’ve ever done.’
“And we pushed the reset button. We went through all of the zillions of models we’d made and ideas we’d had. And we ended up creating what you see here as the iPhone, which is dramatically better. It was hell because we had to go to the team and say, ‘All this work you’ve [done] for the last year, we’re going to have to throw it away and start over, and we’re going to have to work twice as hard now because we don’t have enough time.’ And you know what everybody said? ‘Sign us up.’”
We love Apple for their compulsive attitude towards product design. Apple must be one awesome place to work, annoying at times, but well, who doesn’t like a project!
The full article is here, and we congratulate Apple for remaining Number One on the Fortune 500.
That story about the iPhone design made me chuckle.
These people are completely mad. But that’s why we love them so much.
Ummm … they’re not number one on the Fortune 500.
They are the number one most admired company, which is arguably a better position to be in.
D
uhm if you take a look around everything (for the majority) is released on a tuesday. All new movies video games and a lot of other companies use tuesdays. It is just the chosen day to do such things.
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