APPLE still building fanbois CULT HQ in Cupertino, it seems The new Apple Fruit Loop HQ is taking shape, with the foundations laid and the building now resembling the ruined monolithic gathering place of a once mighty Pagan cult. Which, of course, is kind of what the Apple Campus II will be when completed. Inside will burn the eternal flame of Steve Jobs, stoked by the whispy dreams of …
For all the Apple Haters that post here.
The HQ could probably be some crappy ex-hipster bar in London that serves only gassy over chilled lager and the rallying cry would be 'No Fruit Today'.
If you want to visit a CULT HQ, then may I humbly suggest a country house near East Grinstead where the members are just a sueball happy as Apple (if not more so...).
Well with Samsung third quarter profits down 60% and Apple set for another record quarter (it's been ever upwards since the iPhone launched) Jasper is somewhat scraping the barrel to distract from his years of "Peak Apple" prognostication fail.
Jasper, do you really think it looks like a Nazi structure or was that just your mind racing to find something, anything, other than the image of humble pie that keeps popping into your mind's eye?
Jasper, do you really think it looks like a Nazi structure or was that just your mind racing to find something, anything, other than the image of humble pie that keeps popping into your mind's eye?
Nah, he just wanted to create the shortest distance between an article and Godwin's law in the comments, and you can only do that by starting in the article itself :)
Oversized, simple geometric shapes, imposed onto a constructed rural idyll. That's pretty much what you got from Europe's totalitarian regimes in terms of architecture: brutal, simplistic and at overwhelming scale.
This new HQ is a sign of a company that's forgotten what made it successful. Apple is not a department of public works or a property developer: it's a consumer electronics maker. This project, however, is so big and so expensive, and will overrun by so much, that it will steal time from Cook and other senior managers, exactly when they need to be focussing on dealing with the consequences of a smartphone market that has reached maturity, and an installed share that has hit a plateau.
That's before you look at the inefficiencies of an office where everyone is housed at the furthest possible distance from everyone else (by definition, that's what you get from a circle). Infinite Loop might have been cramped, but it only took three minutes to walk across the central lawn, and only a couple more to cross Mariani Avenue. What is someone supposed to do if their office is at 45 degrees, and the person they need to meet regularly is now at 270 ?
Hubris. But they might remember that as a public company, it's not their money that's being spent, but the shareholders'.
"Hubris. But they might remember that as a public company, it's not their money that's being spent, but the shareholders'."
1. It is "their" money more than the shareholders, since it was given to them on the understanding they are in charge and the shareholders have a share in the company and their leadership.
2. Any shareholder's who don't like it, have been entirely free to divest and purchase alternative stock. Apple shares have risen plenty since the HQ announcement so there is no problem with that.
3. The notion a the company grown to have the highest market cap in the world and some 80,000 employees and that is being criticised for holding too large a cash pile, should stay crammed in an HQ built when they were had about 3,000 employees is hardly credible. Any large HQ will be expensive. Clearly they have to move. Are you suggesting they should inflict an HQ with low architectural merit on their employees and the community?
Another hair-trigger defence of even the slightest anti-Apple sentiment, but you are missing the point.
Yes, Apple need more space, but they should not be custom-making an office for themselves that pushes the boundaries of what's possible in the field when they have no experience in construction/real-estate management. This is a classic example of a corporation spending large amounts of money on a non-value-add activity that's outside of their competency - this never ends well. This project will overrun, and overrun badly, and while Apple may have a big ol' ball of money, most of it's offshore; it hasn't got very much in the USA unless it wants to repatriate it and finally pay some tax.
The campus at Infinite Loop was built at a time when Apple's headcount was far higher than 3,000. I was there frequently in the late 1990s, after the post-Scully retrenchments (when Apple's global headcount was still at about 10,000, incidentally) and there were great expanses of empty office space available back then. Apple also occupied (and under-utilised) a variety of buildings on nearby Mariani Ave and De Anza Blvd, including a vanity "office of the CEO" in a building later taken over by Texaco (I think).
But even still, do you really think that all of Apple's 80,000 global staff work in Cupertino? That figure includes retail managers and store staff, in-country distribution and marketing, customer service and support, manufacturing supervision and global logistics. This is the bulk of the payroll, and none of it is in Cupertino.
You are entirely wrong about point one. The capital of a publicly-traded corporation is the property of its shareholders. It's not me saying this, it's the law. The shareholders may tolerate the company blowing chunks of cash on vanity projects, so long as the price rises, but trust me: when that stock falls, questions will be asked about this. Right now, the management is able to appeal to the baser instincts of its shareholders, so proper corporate governance is taking a back seat.
Your second point is confusing correlation and cause. The HQ announcement and the share-price rise have the same common cause: Apple's prior success in selling their products at amazing margins: success that emanated from the "cramped" HQ with "low architectural merit" (I wonder have you actually been inside the Infinite Loop campus? Architecturally, it was very conducive to getting work done when I was there)
I understand that you're an Apple fan, but someone who wants to see the company do well should at least be concerned about how it uses its assets.
Yes, Apple need more space, but they should not be custom-making an office for themselves that pushes the boundaries of what's possible in the field when they have no experience in construction/real-estate management.
You don't think Apple is building it themselves do you? They've hired world class architects and a construction company capable of pushing the boundaries in those fields. It's not like Tim Cook is making day to day construction decisions, that's all delegated to people who have the relevant experience.
If a company with deep pockets like Apple isn't supposed to push the boundaries, who should? Governments, using public money? Private investors, building solely for their own ego? Imagine if Larry Ellison had been the investor behind The Shard...
Private investors, building solely for their own ego? Imagine if Larry Ellison had been the investor behind The Shard...
And you can't see that this is Steve Jobs's ego. The difference between Apple and those property investors: Apple is spending $5bn* constructing an overhead cost, whereas the investors sell or rent what they build in order to gain an income.
(* $5 billion is the estimate from Norman Foster, the lead architect; I've never known an architect's estimate to be MORE than the final build cost, and it's often far, far less).
Those Manhattan HQ's are leased, and the risks on their construction were borne by the property developer. The construction itself is usually quite standard, with the money being spent on internal finishing.
The difference with Apple's adventure is that they are both the property developer, and the sole tenant of the buildings. They're also combining a technically challenging structure with the extremely high-cost fitout. The overrun on this project will far exceed any imagined improvements in productivity (and if you know people in Apple, I'm sure they'll tell you that it's not the offices, but rather the amount of time they're expected to be in them, that is the issue).
This exactly the sort of "landmark" spending that big companies have engaged in in the past.. right before their terminal decline set in.
That's before you look at the inefficiencies of an office where everyone is housed at the furthest possible distance from everyone else (by definition, that's what you get from a circle
You have to be a bit of a rebel, but you don't have to follow the circumference to get from A to B, you can also go through the middle...
"you can also go through the middle.."
Er, yes. That's the point. A circular structure will still maximises the average distance to a destination, because every possible destination is located on the perimeter. (And that's before you consider that there will be only a finite number of doors opening onto the inner court)
It also reduces the possibility of clustering, because offices are arranged on only one axis (rotational co-ordinate; radius is fixed) rather than two (east/west and north-south).
"A circular structure will still maximises the average distance to a destination"
Nonsense. An unlikely but nevertheless feasible linear structure does that.
I understand the point you are trying to make, but how inefficient the circular structure is all depends on the size of the hole in the middle. Not much different from having e.g. a large atrium in a cubic structure and more efficient for any given ratio of office to hole/atrium in the middle. If what goes on in the middle is a part of office life, it's hardly inefficient. It's not all about footfalls from point A to B but also about e.g. how much peace and tranquility can be found at lunchtime or when holding meetings in the outdoor central area. Plus of course it's simply nice to have natural light from two walls and a circular office is quite efficient in that regard. Similarly cuboid office dwellers like atria (yes I had to look up the plural form) because they feel less hemmed in.
Don't worry - he's just jealous.
The whole construction is actually a transmigration loop designed specifically to transfer the suspended soul of Steve Jobs (or should we say 'St. Eve Jobs') into the receptacle of a suitable donor body. They tested Jasper and found the presence of too many progates and proballmer ions for him to judged as a suitable receptor.
Incidentally the codename for the new HQ is actually iMohtep - that kind of gives the game away I think.
As someone who prefers Macs over other-PCs but has no iPhone (or smart phone in fact!) and has been an Apple-preferrer for many years, I wonder if this might be the beginning of Apple's demise - I know they have lots of cash so should be able to pay for this easily - but having worked in creative places for some years now, I've usually found that when there is a hotch-potch annoying arrangement of stuff, people somehow are more creative even though they moan about it. When you try to tidy things up and order them, the creativity goes.
Hopefully I'll be wrong on this one
There's a good reason why buildings aren't designed as circles. Doing so wastes a lot of materials to transport water, power, and data around. There is also the issues with the greatly increased surface area producing an exponentially greater load on the climate control systems.
If they really were trying to be green, then a dome would the most efficient building design, but it would reduce the number of exterior windows and we all know how, even inside of the company, that status symbols are the only things that matter.
The idea is to modulate window openings rather than run the extremely powerful air conditioning systems required to cool a cube full of people and computers. Cupertino weather is so mild that the only difference between summer clothes and winter clothes is the length of your shirt sleeves.
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