What Happened to Yahoo
Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article.<p><i>...the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had.</i><p>Is Apple a big winner, like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook (the other companies he mentions repeatedly)? Bigger. (Check the last 1, 5 or 10 years on Google finance for the GOOG or MSFT comparison. FB is not public, but...) Do they have this obnoxiously elitist focus? No. They still manage to hire great engineers, though.<p><i>So which companies need to have a hacker-centric culture?... any company that needs to have good software.</i><p>I wouldn't say that Apple is dominated by a hacker culture at all. It's dominated by Steve Jobs and a focus on design and attention to detail. Yet that seems to produce much better software than Google or Microsoft, IMHO. That's <i>very</i> subjective, I realize, but the market seems to agree. At any rate, Apple does produce <i>good software</i>.<p>So are the hacker culture and the elitist focus really necessary for a technology company to succeed? Is Apple a complete anomaly while Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are typical? What say you, pg?<p>I realize it's borderline suicidal to post an HN comment that simultaneously calls out pg and lauds Apple, but it's criminal to completely leave the best (imho) technology company out of a discussion about attributes of great technology companies.