The part about being dedicated enough to donate weekends and vacation time struck me. I'm of multiple minds about that mentality when it's applied to a large company. On the one hand, there's something beautiful about having a day job <i>so meaningful</i> you'll happily do more of it for free. On the other hand, I wonder if there's something exploitative about the following situation: Both employees and owners give over their lives, employees get satisfaction, and owners get satisfaction <i>plus</i> the financial rewards of the lives everyone donated. On the other other hand, if the employees enter into that deal consciously and happily, then maybe nobody loses. On the other other other hand, maybe there's also an element of brainwashing--which can, in principle, cause people to consciously and happily enter into exploitative relationships. Clearly, this is a complicated issue, and I don't feel at all qualified to pass moral judgment on it one way or another.
<i>"For Apple, having a small, really focused organization made a lot of sense when Steve was there, because so many ideas came from Steve. So having a smaller group work on some of these ideas made sense," Kawano says. "As Apple shifted to much more of a company where there's multiple people at the top, I think it makes sense that they're growing the design team in interesting ways."</i><p>If anything turns out to be Apple's downfall, it is embodied in this paragraph. In most companies, to beat your competitors, you first have to defeat the other corporate divisions. The presence of Steve Jobs probably prevented this and resulted in a significant part of Apple's competitive advantage. The key here is not Steve Jobs per se, but that a single individual could champion particular ideas and see them through to completion without opposition and interference.<p>Amazon currently enjoys something like this, I suspect.
"MYTH #1 Apple Has The Best Designers" - don't want to be a troll, but it's enough to say "iOS7" as an anwser (e.g. <a href="http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ios-7" rel="nofollow">http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ios-7</a>)