Is Secrecy Always A Good Thing? The Tale of Apple Aperture vs Adobe Lightroom

Apple is known for its penchant for secrecy. Products are developed as top-secret projects and unveiled to the public with great fanfare. This has brought it tremendous benefit, for example with during the dramatic launch of the iPhone by Steve Jobs. However secrecy carries costs, and in some cases the costs outweigh the benefits.

Apple & Its Culture of Secrecy

Yet Apple retains this approach across a whole range of its products; secrecy is apparently “baked into the corporate culture”.

Consider Aperture 3.0, the newly updated photo-management product by Apple aimed at professional photographers. It was launched last week following Apple’s usual “secret till the last minute” approach. It is instructive to compare Aperture to Lightroom, a very similar product by Apple’s rival Adobe which has taken a very different approach.

1st Effect of the Secrecy: Poorly-tested Software

There have been two effects of the secrecy surrounding Apple’s Aperture 3.0. First, the direct effect of launching poorly-tested software. Twitter and the Apple forums are full of complaints by anguished customers who have been unable to upgrade older photo libraries.

No doubt there is a selection bias and users with a trouble-free experience are less likely to visit these forums and complain. But this is hardly the “awesome” and polished experience that is expected from Apple, a company that uses “it just works” as a tagline.

Among the reports are complaints by customers whose computers have totally frozen during the upgrade, those who succeeded in upgrading but then found it unstable, and those who gave up but were unable to reinstall earlier versions of that software. It is clear from these reports that Aperture 3 was insufficiently tested before being sold, especially against real-world photo libraries in use by existing users.

2nd Effect of the Secrecy: Counterproductive for the Professional Audience

A second effect of secrecy is that professionals have been increasingly adopting Adobe Lightroom. While the buzz of unveiling a new product may matter for consumer-oriented products like the iPhone or iPad, Aperture is aimed at professional photographers, design companies and media organisations. For this audience, surprise may be less important and even counterproductive.

Instead, advance knowledge of upcoming features and a stable product at launch time are probably more important. These allow the client to anticipate changes and plan for its integration into existing workflows and business processes.

Adobe’s Different Approach With Lightroom