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A comment on Apple’s culture of secrecy wore down Swift creator and Xcode lead Chris Lattner. Parent comment

Re:Apple’s culture of secrecy wore down Swift creator and Xc... by Balgair on Friday January 13, 2017 @09:30AM (#13391011)
Don't Forget Wave !

... I really liked Wave...

On Apple's culture: Ship has sailed. Tim doesn't have the gravitas to ensure a new 'Wow!' product is going to ship. He's a damn good manager, but not a superb innovator. Unfortunately, Apple is at it's heart, a 'Wow!' company. I suppose Apple has 'topped off' now and is a mature business state. This is a good thing though! More room for innovations!

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Re:Apple’s culture of secrecy wore down Swift creator and Xc... by wlesieutre on Friday January 13, 2017 @09:55AM (#13391217)
And GOOG-411 (didn't have a smartphone yet when they killed this, it was still useful), Google Labs (public access to experimental features in Gmail and other services), Buzz (jk nobody misses that), Reader, Code Search, Q&A, iGoogle portals, and plenty of others.
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Re:Apple’s culture of secrecy wore down Swift creator and Xc... by vram22 on Friday January 13, 2017 @12:45PM (#13392748)
Didn't know that Google Labs was shut down. Some of the Gmail Labs were useful - and some have probably gone mainstream by now. The one that reminds you if you use a word like "attached" in your email, but have no attachment, comes to mind. I tried at least half a dozen of them, may have only kept using one or two. Still, the Labs idea was good.
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Re:Apple’s culture of secrecy wore down Swift creator and Xc... by mcintyre1994 on Friday January 13, 2017 @01:51PM (#13393482)
Undo send originated there as well.
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Re:Apple’s culture of secrecy wore down Swift creator and Xc... by throwaway1892 on Monday January 16, 2017 @11:11AM (#13410754)
I've been using it for years, so I did not realised they had closed Labs in the interim.
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Re:Apple’s culture of secrecy wore down Swift creator and Xc... by vram22 on Friday January 13, 2017 @03:58PM (#13394642)
Right, good point. That has saved me a few times from accidentally sending an incomplete email - luckily not anything worse :)
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Re:Apple’s culture of secrecy wore down Swift creator and Xc... by chx on Friday January 13, 2017 @12:41PM (#13392716)
Google Questions. I know it's been long ago and there were problems but when you needed it for real it worked wonders.
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Re:Apple’s culture of secrecy wore down Swift creator and Xc... by WWLink on Friday January 13, 2017 @10:03PM (#13396597)
"Wow!" products usually don't happen overnight though. Take the iPhone for example! Apple was playing around with ideas for tablets, handhelds, PDAs, and other stuff for decades before they launched that. A lot of "what if" prototypes were made and dead end projects ensued.

Google kinda had the right idea with 20% time, I think. In order to make truly ground breaking ideas, you have to have a little bit of margin for playing with ideas. If you make your entire business about trimming fat, making synergies, and maximizing the efficiency - squeezing it out of everyone involved, you're no longer an innovator, you're just an assembly line.

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