Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it's hackerly...
No, it's not. That gets at the very essence of my original comment. One of the assertions in the article is that a hacker culture is a necessary ingredient for a successful technology company. I see Apple as a counterexample to this argument. And it's a counterexample that shouldn't be ignored. Apple is driven by design (industrial design, product design, graphic design). They think about products, not technology. Th…
Google's products are mostly software running on servers in datacenters. Facebooks products are the same way. Yahoo's products were mostly software.
Apple's products are not mostly software. Apple sells consumer devices run by software. It's an important distinction, and looking at it that way lets you compare with different sorts of companies, like the technology startup Emotiv Systems[1][2]. They're developing consumer devices that read brain activity like an EEG. They likely spend a lot of time developing their SDK and other software, but they also have to focus on the physical product, like Apple does.
Sometimes people forget or don't realize that "hacker culture" has always had a contingent of hardware guys building solar-cars and robots[3] and kites with cameras.