> And how they’ll need to change the questions they ask of potential senior execs in order to bring in some of the mentality required to iterate towards excellence in public as opposed to behind closed doors.

I feel like, with possibly the exception of the iPhone, Apple's magic sauce has been to let others launch first and learn from their mistakes, iterate in private until they have their product as close to perfection as they can, then release it.

They weren't the first computer. They weren't the first MP3 player. They weren't the first place to buy songs online. They weren't the first to make a smartphone. They weren't the first to make a tablet.

Granted these weren't software services for the most part, they were hardware. But in the same sense, Apple does a lot of development in the background almost by design, so they can storm the set and have a polished product ready to go (with some exceptions, notably Mobile Me).

This "iterating on the fly" web thing is a software mentality. I'd argue that Apple is first & foremost a hardware company. Once you release the hardware, you're stuck with it for better or worse. There's no such "ship it before it's ready and fix it later" mindset in hardware.