I am really interested to know the management practices in place at Apple that enable this kind of a personal reaction to even be possible.
It simply cant be that Steve is a very conscientous person (which I'm sure he is) - but also that the infrastructure in Apple allows this.
I run a 13 people shop and I know I will get to a point where I will not be able to look at individual bugs/questions, etc. What kind of triggers, tools and techniques make it possible for an issue to be filtered up the hierarchy ?
Or is it simply because of the any-employee-can-mail-holy-Steve-but-god-help-you-if-it-was-unimportant policy?
Well, don't forget selection bias. We hear about the lucky few who hear back from Steve Jobs, but not about the hundreds that write to sjobs@apple.com and never hear back. So it could be as simple as "Steve Jobs spends 15 minutes every day on answering public emails chosen at random".
Well that would imply that Steve has at least the common decency to keep up appearances of caring about customers/partners. Like others have said this is so rare nowadays that it might as well be a black swan. And I'm talking from personal experience as customer and also as a professional who cares about users perception and who fails to understand why people keep on disrespecting people who feed them.
The case here is - that Apples contrarian play at basically everything is drawing insane dividends. And its cheap to do (Apples bottom line is proof). So if Steve is sincere in his care or not - doesn't really matter. If people around you perceive your acts as genuine - then its genuine for all intents and purposes.
It may be that Steve Jobs email account is monitored by one or more personal assistants, who act as a human filter for importance. The private API question seems important, and they could raise that issue to Jobs' priority inbox. Of course, the account is also accessible by Jobs himself which explains the responses to emails that seem unimportant.
Its probably the same way President Obama writes letters. Just a few chosen (either at random or someone reads all the letters and choses a few for him) letters get replies, from the hundreds of letters he gets.
It simply cant be that Steve is a very conscientous person (which I'm sure he is) - but also that the infrastructure in Apple allows this.
I run a 13 people shop and I know I will get to a point where I will not be able to look at individual bugs/questions, etc. What kind of triggers, tools and techniques make it possible for an issue to be filtered up the hierarchy ?
Or is it simply because of the any-employee-can-mail-holy-Steve-but-god-help-you-if-it-was-unimportant policy?