the lure of the challenge- the iphone dev team

Influx Insights — 2009-01-05T10:11:43Z

There's a great interview in Mobilecrunch with one of the members of the iPhone Dev Team.

This is not a unit inside Apple responsible for updating the phone software, quite the opposite; it's a team of unpaid renegades who are tearing up the phone and hacking it to pieces. These are a group of highly motivated, unpaid folks who just love the challenge.

Here are some of the key points I took out of the piece.

1. Real time transparent communication is key

The group use IRC and file serving technologies to make sure all team members are kept in the loop

2. Intelligent groups can self-organize

The group has no need for leaders, each person is smart enough to understand their role and find one that matches their expertise.

3. The group is unified by a core motivation

"The same interest that I had with tearing apart my Speak & Spell as a kid, then my Tandy CoCo, then my Atari ST. I want to see what is inside and see if I can make it better. If I find something cool I tell other people about it."

4. The core motivation has an additional edge

The attitude of the Apple brand to the way in which it restricts the way the phone is used.

"Apple places restrictions on what you can run on the device. They impose draconian restrictions on the type of application that you can run, they don’t allow applications to run in the background and they even restrict the applications by subject matter or if they compete with their own applications."

Posted by Ed Cotton

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the lure of the challenge- the iphone dev team