As user of Apple's computers since 1981, I've watched with some interest as Apple evolved from an apparently wide-open technology company to a profoundly leak-resistant company. (Anyone remember the Mac the Knife column in MacWEEK?) Apple's lawsuit against the Mac rumor site Think Secret ruffled many feathers, leading at least one person to ask if Apple was becoming "Microsoft-like" in its conduct.

It has and it hasn't. As our fair editor pointed out, Apple has maintained a close integration of its hardward and software, and "always strived for beautiful, cool, elegant, and [easy-to-understand] interfaces, while most things in the wintel world are clunky/geeky/and for some hard to understand."

And furthermore, the licensing of Microsoft's products is infamous. Attempting to reinstall Windows on a computer requires you to (somehow) liberate the license number from the old computer, or even the old hard disk. Even if this has started to change, they're still sticklers for the license number. To much the opposite effect, I've never had to enter a license number when dealing with an Apple product -- make that any Apple product, be it produced in 1981, 1991, 2001, or so on.

But there's one overriding quality about Microsoft that stands out in my mind: groupthink. It permeates Microsoft's corporate culture, and, I imagine, its most devoted user base. The prevalent groupthink (that and the fact that I'm not a computer programmer) is a large part of why I could never work at Microsoft, or be a Republican. An ad for employment in Microsoft's group that makes their iPod knockoff illustrates it to a tee.
 

This is from The Register:

"As previously reported by TechFlash in December, Microsoft has posted
job listings for positions at its Musiwave subsidiary that involve
incorporating Musiwave technology into the Zune Marketplace.

" 'The Zune organization is making a strategic change from a 3rd party
content provider to in-house," reads one Musiwave job post. 'We need
to rebuild, re-architect, and revitalize a content ingestion pipeline
[emphasis added] that powers the entire Zune business. And we have a very
short time to do it.' "

While I've only seen a few listings for employment at Apple, I never saw one that had such overwhelming and buzzword-compliant groupthink in its core. Groupthink was at the antithesis of what made Apple such a revolutionary company in the early 1980s, and probably some of what led to its near downfall in the mid-90s. While Microsoft has used groupthink to its advantage to achieve a de facto (and now slowly eroding) monopoly, it's still nothing that I want to be a part of, or use if I don't have to.