Each large company has a unique internal corporate culture. The corporate culture of Apple can be described quite accurately with the word "paranoid". The company's management is so concerned about the secrecy of developments that employees very often do not know what their colleagues from neighboring departments are working on.

According to the publication of The Outline, the company regularly conducts various trainings designed to enhance secrecy. For example, recently, about a hundred employees of the company were forced to attend an hourly presentation of "Stopping Leakers - Keeping Confidential at Apple" ("Stop leaks - maintaining confidentiality in Apple"),. The irony is that the details of this presentation very soon flowed into the Internet.

"Surprise and admire".

No matter how much Apple does not terrorize its employees, the company can not stop the leakage. Information about upcoming releases gets into the network months before the scheduled time. If so, does all this secrecy matter? According to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple,.

Cook is confident that it was the leak of information about the upcoming iPhone 2017 that triggered a drop in sales of the iPhone 7 in the second quarter of this year. Like, users, after reading about the innovations that should appear in the new model, do not rush to buy a product that has already entered the market. In addition, according to Cook, privacy is an important "chip" of Apple. The company, according to the director, should "surprise and delight" users during official presentations. So, until this point, all the details of the new product should be kept secret.

However, it is not at all a fact that secrecy, indeed, promotes sales. Just look at a couple of recent Apple releases: the iPhone 7 and MacBook Pro. Information that the new smartphone will not have a 3.5-millimeter audio output for headphones, appeared on the network months before the presentation. And still this fact caused a storm of indignation from users. Information about the additional touch panel Touch Bar in the MacBook Pro, too, leaked to the Internet before the release of the laptop. And still this panel caused heated discussions.

Perhaps the best example of this situation is Apple Watch. Recall, the release of these smart hours took place in the first half of 2015, but a huge amount of information about them could be found on the Internet as early as 2014. Has the sale worsened? Hardly. Even now, Apple Watch remains one of the most popular wearable gadgets on the market.

It seems that the success of this or that product has nothing to do with the "surprise" during his presentation.

Innovation is more important than surprises.

Quite possibly, the dual camera and the unique portrait mode of the iPhone 7, indeed, would cause more public delight, if the information about them did not leak into the network in advance. On the other hand, and a negative response from the lack of a 3.5mm audio output could be a much larger.

Of course, secrecy can be important, but only many companies bring it to the point of absurdity. For example, at the end of last year, Google's product manager filed for his company in court because of too zealous interference in the lives of employees of internal security services. According to his lawsuit, Google has a whole program of internal espionage and a giant team of internal investigations. Within the framework of the program called Stopleaks, internal security services establish surveillance of employees who are suspected of divulging secret company data.

It is important to note that Apple in its time actively advocated for encryption and privacy. Recall last year the company was at the request of US special services to hack into the smartphone of the alleged terrorist.

But this principled position does not prevent Apple from hiring the former intelligence agencies and in its domestic policy to adhere to the same rules that prevail in any government agency.

And is this privacy so important? As the experience of previous releases shows, secrecy has little effect on the success of a particular product. In the end, something truly wonderful does not become less remarkable if people find out about this a little before the official release. So the company should focus on creating something truly innovative instead of trying to arrange another sluggish surprise for the world.