Apple bought a huge piece of Bay Area property for a new corporate campus, promising to develop the land into an enormous project that would allow thousands of company employees to live, work, shop and play without ever having to leave company property. It would be the perfect community for staffers who are allowed to work any 80 hours per week they choose. This may sound a lot like Apple’s plan to redevelop the old Hewlett-Packard Cupertino campus about a mile from current Apple headquarters on Infinite Loop, but it isn’t. What I’ve just described was Apple Computer’s plan to develop 640 acres in Coyote Valley south of San Jose, circa 1985.
What goes around comes around.
Back in the early 1980s, Apple Computer Chairman Steve Jobs drove the company to buy a big chunk of the pristine Coyote Valley, at that time devoted to agriculture, and turn it into a world class live-work environment for up to 25,000 of Apple’s rabidly loyal employees. The land was purchased but the building never started because Jobs lost his job in a political battle with then-CEO John Sculley sending Apple into its own Dark Ages.
With the 2010 Apple building project, reportedly to be designed by noted modern architect Norman Foster, Jobs may be returning to that 25 year-old dream which Apple can easily afford given its profitability and huge cash cache. The bigger question, though, is whether the plan bodes ill for Apple’s future as a company? Silicon Valley history suggests that such big building projects are not a good thing.
It is usually referred to as an Edifice Complex, this need for successful technology companies to plow huge amounts of cash into elaborate over-designed building projects. Borland, Exodus, Excite@Home, Netscape, WebTV, SGI, Palm and Yahoo all built ultra-modern state-of-the-art office and lab complexes shortly before they went into decline or dropped out of business entirely. Borland spent $90 million on an amazing development in Scotts Valley that never completely opened, the company crashed so fast. SGI’s striking campus today houses the best-known pieces of Google, the search giant getting credit for Jim Clarke’s architectural vision.
Only Oracle with its silver cylinders in Redwood Shores seems to have been able to defeat the build-then-fade syndrome which goes far beyond the list of companies in my last paragraph.
It’s not clear exactly what kind of corporate hubris makes this happen, but almost every dramatic corporate HQ in the Bay Area that was originally owned, not rented, tends to have been built by a company that no longer exists. Maybe they were too busy building to keep minding the store. Whatever the case, its enough to tell me that real estate is probably a bad investment for any high tech company.
When I last worked at Apple in the early 1980s the only building the company actually owned was a fiberglass barn erected in a farmer’s field back in rural Pescadero, CA used to test Apple products for FCC compliance. And then Jobs bought Coyote Valley followed shortly thereafter by the end of his first career.
Maybe this new HQ is not such a good idea, Steve.
It would be the perfect community for staffers who are allowed to work any 80 hours per week they choose
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i dont know how much i like a company that has its employees work an 80 hour week? is this a type or is the campus open 80 hours a week and you just choose what hours you want to work?
Whether true or not, it was believed to be the “rule of thumb” at Apple. Dot coms were the same. I worked dot coms, and they were very adept at filling hours. Not much got done, of course, but there were lots o brownie points for just being there.
When I worked at Apple, I loved what I did and worked very long weeks.
They did not keep tabs on me, and allowed me to work at home, to work whatever hours I pleased, to take time off whenever I needed to. I, in turn, did not not abuse their trust, and worked very long hours.
I wouldn’t say that people insisted or expected that I work this way. Rather, I’d say that when you are young and working on something you love, it is natural to pour many many hours into it.
As for the snide remarks about “Not much got done, of course, but there were lots o brownie points for just being there.” yeah well, whatever. I’m sure you have plenty of insider experience at Apple, a company which, with not that many employees in the grand scheme of things has, last time I checked, actually achieved quite a lot in its chosen space.
Although 80 is a bit excessive, is there really anywhere in IT that offers a 40-hour work week and enough pay to raise a modest middle-class family? Is that even available in any industry in the USA these days?
I interviewd at TI years back. They offered me less than I was getting in the current job but only expected a half day on saturday
Earlier this year I left a job paying $120K (plus benefits/etc) which in my area (Atlanta) is a pretty decent salary… I’m now making $125K (plus benefits/etc)… I’ve got an interview tomorrow with a company that hopefully will offer me even more…. and none of these jobs require substantially more than 40 hours / week except in extreme circumstances.
So yes, such companies exist. They’re generally small (<100 emps) and you've got to be pretty good at what you do. And, let's be honest, pretty good at convincing people that you're pretty good (I seem to have a knack for that, though I don't really know how/why)
hmm. type is supposed to by typo.
oh the irony
wow im tired. typos in a message apologizing for typos.
Yeah, I thought you meant to say, “oh the ironing.” I often make typos when my mind wanders to piles of wrinkled clothing.
BTW – This idea makes me think of the movie “Visioneers,” which may have been partially inspired by the original Jobs plan. Anyway, it sounds like fun. Let the corporate dystopian future fun commence!
Why would anyone WANT to be in a work/live complex? Are they family-less? Or do they just not want to be at home?
My undergrad experience has taught me to value every second I can get at home, so these buildings/complexes seem terrible to me. I guess I can see the shopping thing. It’d be nice to be able to grab what I need on the way home, but seriously this whole idea is misguided.
Maybe if the whole goal was to save the workers time and money they’d be on to something, but these are clearly just monuments to the company’s desire to work their people to death. No wonder it’s build and fade, it’s like building a death star aimed at the home planet of everyone who is supposed to work in it.
Ah, the young forget what they never knew or read in history. The Company Town is just the same. Not to mention the futurists from the 1950’s. And the “residential colleges” I taught at in the 1970’s: everything was in one or two buildings, ghettos spread over the campus.
Companies do it different ways. Microsoft hires kids fresh out of college from all over the world, puts them in Redmond where their only friends are at work, then prohibits working from home. Google does the same and adds free food and laundry service. Google, too, has asked the Mountain View planning department to approve living units at their campus, probably for visitors from foreign labs. It’s all the same and it isn’t intrinsically bad if you are young and in love with your work. But it IS manipulative.
If anyone can do it Apple can. It must be annoying to Jobs having all those flashy looking glass cubes and cylinders and the other stores dotted around the world when their HQ, from what I have seen in photos is comparably plain (though a couple of pics from inside it looked cool).
Even if you are young and in love with your work.. once you sniff out the ulterior motives behind the generous company gym membership and other perks the matrix starts to unfold – it’s like you never escaped your parents basement. I chose red and suddenly everything they did for me had an ugly taste to it… I had to escape…
Titus Salt did this 2 centuries ago. Google “Saltaire”.
Anyone for living in Jobsville?
Is it possible to do this just to save on commute times and yet still have a private life? Seems like it could be a great employee benefit if you made it absolutely clear that employees were not expected to work overtime.
Well as exempt employees they are not PAID for overtime, but there are very few Apple engineers who would be kept on-the-job if they limited themselves to 40 hours-per-week.
Uhh..as exempt, you’re NOT paid for overtime, which is the usual in tech jobs.
Speaking of typos. I had a read-o. Sorry, Bob did have it right.
My guess (obviously only that) is that Apple won’t just spend money on this new, green campus; they will spend money on strategic acquisitions of some of the green-tech companies that make such a green campus possible, interesting, extra-sustainable, more cost-effective, or otherwise attractive. That the green campus will be, in part, a forcing function for getting Apple up to speed on and invested in the kinds of technologies that make sense in an anticipated future where building for sustainability becomes an economic advantage rather than a seeming self-indulgence.
In other words I think it will turn out to be more than just a flashy corporate campus. I think it will be a platform for Apple to start tinkering to figure out what the driving industries of the future could be.
Probably not. It comes down to use of capital. Those green companies can’t offer a rate of return comparable to Apple simply reinvesting in itself so it won’t happen. Apple will BUY from those companies but for the most part it won’t INVEST in them. That’s just wishful thinking. The irony here, of course, is that sitting on cash is an even worse use of capital in the current interest rate environment, but Wall Street sees that as a non-decision and tends not to punish companies for it.
Apple did complete their current HQ as an R&D campus in 1993, a year before the first PowerMacs were introduced. With the PowerMacs Apple was actually the #1 U.S. retailer of personal computers for a while, with somewhere between 10% and 15% of all sales.
A notable quote from one of the articles linked in the main story:
“Pathways between building[s] will occur underground to keep as much of the surface green as possible.”
…and be perfect to transport prototypes between buildings, keeping as much of Apple’s product development as secret as possible!
I can just imagine tube cars running underground between buildings, like in Logan’s Run or the volcano base in You Only Live Twice. 🙂
Go back to the actual numbers from companies like PC Data (now the NPD Group) and you’ll see Apple hasn’t been the #1 PC maker since 1981 when the Apple IIe ruled in terms of revenue and the Commodore 64 in terms of units.
Adobe, Symantec and Microsoft all survived their edifice complex episodes. And Apple survived 1 Infinite Loop.
None of those companies owned their Silicon Valley campuses. All were renters. Microsoft owns its complex in Redmond, but I’d hardly call it iconic in any sense.
Have a look on Wikipedia about the skyscraper index, which says that the tallest building have been built on the eve of an economic downturn. So I think this edifice complex might be large than just Apple and other tech companies.
Having grown up in WV this reminds me of an old time coal town. In a coal town the mine owned the town, the homes, the stores, pretty much everything. All of the workers pay went back to their employer. The end result was the workers could not save any money and they couldn’t afford to move elsewhere to find better work. For all practical purposes they became prisoners to the mine.
Now I don’t expect an Apple (or Google, or …) community to be that bad. One has to be careful about what is done and why. In time the workers need to become part of the overall community. They need to own homes, raise their families, be active with their kids schools and sports, etc.
I used to live in Palo Alto just down the street from Tennessee Ernie Ford (his license plate was PEAPICKR) and at one neighborhood party we did a duet of his song Sixteen Tons (“I owe my soul to the company store…”).
I was wondering how long it would take to work “16 tons” into the thread. Perhaps that is Steve Jobs’ plan. An Apple campus town where the employees buy their iBread, iMilk, iShirts, & iSocks from the company store. No iGas, though, as you don’t want them being able to drive their iCars out of the place.
And all children will be conceived via iNVitro fertilization.
Maybe isolating your workers from the real world encourages narrow thinking that contributes to a company’s decline. If you end up living/working in Jobstown, I suggest you pass on the free Koolaid.
I lived in oil company “camps” in the 50’s and 60’s. It’s a very interesting experience to grow up with people whose father’s all worked for the same company. An interesting aspect was the pecking order amoung children was reflected by the position of their father in the company.
It’s interesting that there is all but one (guarded) positive post regarding the new campus proposal. Is this our usual preconception waiting to be blasted by a genuine innovation from Apple?
I’m a bit surprised that the article makes no mention of the lavish expansion that was done by Jobs for Pixar, which seems to have worked out alright. It remains to be seen what will be done with the new land, but the assumption that it will include a residential component seems presumptuous.
Lavish? Pixar’s place in Emeryville is great but the company itself is quite small.
well, it was built with an eye to increased collaboration (a necessity in the art world, and a rarity today STILL in software development), and also with an eye on the possibility of having to turn into their own marketing and distribution company (meaning there were “normal” offices available but not used). With the Disney deal, these became moot.
There was also the awareness of Moore’s Law in action: with technology, fewer people should be able to accomplish more. While Pixar grows financially, they set an upper limit of how much they would attempt to achieve creatively, letting Disney be responsible for the larger revenue growth (in merchandise and promotions) rather than having to grow to supporting even MORE films per year (a-la Dreamworks Animation with 2.5 times as many films, and which has a quality control problem that they’ve just not had to notice yet) to keep that ever-increasing profitability that Wall Street requires. You build a new HQ to address your current situation and give you the room you need to grow. The Emeryville HQ did exactly that, and anything it can’t contain is now Disney’s problem, not Pixar’s.
I think lots of companies went out of business in the valley whether they built a fancy campus or not.
From chapter 6 of “Parkinson’s Law” (1957):
“It is now known that a perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse . . . During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters. The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done. Perfection, we know, is finality; and finality is death.”
Maybe it’s not the headquarters themselves that are the problem, but the fact that an organization has come to find such trappings important. On the other hand, the perfect knowledge economy might involve building a nest so comfortable that your termites never want to leave.
“One more thing, he says, feet still propped up on the executive woodwork–the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., is history too. Eight stories of corporate excess are about to be abandoned. ‘I hate this building,’ says Jobs. ‘This building has come to symbolize everything that went wrong with Apple. It’s about corporate hubris. Greed.’ This is not a building that can make ‘insanely great’ computer products.”
https://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,986849,00.html
The Pixar campus in Emeryville and the Apple Stores were just practice for the ultimate Steve Jobs architectural exercise. I hope he lives long enough to see it completed, he sure is taking his time.
This would explain why Apple now occupies virtually every large building Cupertino has… except for City Center. Gil Amelio had his office on the 8th floor (the only 8th floor in Cupertino), and Steve moved it to Infinite Loop as quickly as he could.
I’m looking forward to the construction, but it’s definitely not going to happen soon. We’ve waited four years for the first 50 acres, and nothing has happened there. Apple moved into most of the existing buildings instead of demolishing them. Now all of the plans will have to be redrawn, unless the plan was in place well before the latest purchase.
I figure it’ll be 2013 before groundbreaking if we’re lucky.
This is why this happens everytime!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XD2kNopsUs&hd=1
Hi Robert X.
There is no evidence that Jobs is building a so-called “company town” in which the worker is abused by high prices at the company store, high rents, unsanitary conditions, meager amenities, outhouses, physical abuse, and lack of movement.
There is no evidence that Apple would not allow employees to live off campus.
In the new city planning paradigm, a live-work community is more sustainable environmentally than where the various parts of a region are segregated based on the type of activity a person does, i.g., work miles from home, etc.
It seems to me that such a community as is rumored to be planned by Apple would be environmentally and socially visionary, not regressive as the article and some comments indicate.
Not to mention the fact that NO-ONE has mentioned that this is what, one mile away from Santana Row, a rather large residential-commercial complex which seems a nice enough place to live and very popular — not where I’d want to live because I suspect it’s a little too noisy at night, but very popular among a certain crowd.
I don’t know the financials on Santana Row, but it is expanding which I assume means they are good.
Current Apple headquarters are five minutes walk from the large Valley Green residential complex where plenty of engineers (including myself) lived.
Assuming Apple plans to allow part of the land to be apartments (which I suspect will either be owned and operated by another entity, or very limited in number and purely for the use of visitors) I don’t see much of a difference in practical terms with what is being planned.
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
This reminds me of the “World’s Tallest Building Syndrome”, the phenomena that the world’s tallest building is usually started during an economic boom time, and finished when the economy goes bust. See the list of world’s tallest buildings over the past century, and the correlation is striking:
Empire State Building: started in 1920’s, finished during Great Depression
Petronas Towers: started in early 1990’s, finished during Asian economic crisis
Burj Dubai: started in early 2000’s, finished during the current crisis
It’s sensible to see how such buildings are proposed, designed, and approved during the easy-credit and emotionally high boom times, only to be completed and often remain partially empty during the following bust.
Link:
https://www.businesscycles.biz/businesscantillon.htm
https://www.ameinfo.com/56699.html
One problem is that architecting a corporate campus to make a corporate statement is very distracting time sink to upper management.
All the effort they spend fighting over who gets private office suites and where the thermostats go takes away from time they should be spending on developing new products and outmaneuvering their competitors.
And I wonder if the management effort to make the building enable new ways of working (e.g. collaboration, physical workflow, security) ends up destroying perfectly good existing work habits. If nothing else, after the company moves in there is a year of nobody being able to find where anything is.
Bob, were you one of the rabidly loyal apple employees?
As bad as the “edifice complex” may be for companies, it’s far worse for individuals. There are countless “great mansions of rich and powerful men” around the world that were never occupied. In the time it took to go from one’s wealth and power “peaking” and the decision being made to build a mansion, to it’s completion, almost invariably, the individual’s wealth disappears. Biltmore (built by an heir, rather than a 1st generation robber barron) and the Hearst Castle (San Simeon) are rare exceptions. Toronto’s Casa Loma is far more typical – the “great man” who had it built lived in it less than 10 years before loosing it. Many other such “edifices” were never occupied – the “fortunes” behind them evaporated before the carpeting could be installed.
I take it as a good sign that the proposed new Jobs’ Residence is as modest as it is. Also, reports that Apple will build mile long tunnels connecting the properties in Cupertino sound wildly implausible. Let’s hold off and see what they are actually proposing.
You forgot about Sun. They built a huge campus at one end of the Dumbarton Bridge in Menlo Park and another huge campus on the other end in Newark. Just before they got bought out by Oracle I worked in Menlo Park and it was a Ghost Town with only one in three “offices” in use and half of those empty all day from people who worked at home. The other campus at the other end of the bridge in Newark was sold off and to this day is vacant.
Historically, I think companies have always lusted after their own landmarks. The Sears tower in Chicago, the Bank of America building in San Francisco. But in recent years, the interval between the rise and fall of companies has become so brief that they don’t get to enjoy or even complete their edifices.
Another sign of change: this week cranes have been dismantling the huge radio dishes at the Blue Cube. To make way for more condos, no doubt.
Or maybe the extravagant stores fulfill the whole edifice thing and and the campus can be practical.
You are correct Bob, it is a big distraction. All the smart people want to be on the big new project. If that project is the new campus, not a product that ships, doom can not be far behind.
The products are left to the second team, committee thinking creeps in, and the next version stinks on ice.
I saw a statistic once. It was something like 98% of corporate HQ moves are closer to the CEO’s home. Where would Steve live? In the pyramid at the center?
Steve commutes from Palo Alto down the 280 freeway. His new place will be a few exits further away on the same freeway. The current Apple campus is right at the freeway offramp; the new property is another exit or two down, and a little further from the freeway itself.
Does that help?
Relating to a previous Jobs-directed new facility creation, this quote offers hope Apple will not take their eye off the ball:
“Unlike Apple, Pixar is expanding, having gone from 175 people to 375 this year alone. The original Richmond studio now has an outpost working busily on a direct-to-video sequel to Toy Story, and there’s a mysterious third major project in the works too. Jobs has plans for a new studio, to sprawl on 16 acres in industrial Emeryville, near Berkeley. Interior plans have been carefully drawn–before the exterior–to ensure a cross-pollination of ideas. And of course, he says, all the offices will be the same size.” (from 1997 Time Magazine story)
About a decade ago Steve Jobs predicted that in the future cities would be architected around the Segway Personal Transporter. Today, I predict the new Apple campus will be architected around the Segway PT.
Having visited the current Apple and the (ex-SGI) Google campuses, my observation is that both are rabbit warrens of corridors and security measures, which restricts the flow of people and their ideas. For the new Apple campus, I envisage insanely great design, ultra-smart individual security solutions, and fast individual people-movers that transport directly from one point to any other point (rather than A-to-B-only 50’s SciFi styled transport-carriages-in-tubes).
Of course, Steve’s Segway PT will be the only white colored one (or maybe it will be aluminum?), while a common-use pool of many hundreds of PTs will be available for staff to zip quickly and efficiently around the campus (ok, along underground corridors connecting the many buildings, if you wish).
I was ready to poo-poo this piece, but there is one striking omission from both it, and the linked site, that lends credence to the theory–Adobe.
They have three office towers in downtown San Jose, and are a company on the downside of the mountain.
Here are the indisputable facts:
Apple needs more space. One infinite loop wasn’t large enough to hold everyone back in the bad old days just before the OS X transition, and no-one was much helped by having substantial parts of the company spread out over a motley collection of buildings around Cupertino. Sure, no-one much cares if you have HR and Accounting in a different building, but is having marketing separate such a good idea? When it gets to having large parts of hardware in different buildings, you’re surely running sub optimally.
I think we all agree, based on our experiences at, eg, college, that there are synergies that occur by having people work together, ideally in the same building, at least in buildings on the same campus. Right now Apple doesn’t have that. And while we all don’t want Apple to submit to Google disease, hiring too many people too far and then coming out with a string of misses and near-misses, we also DO want the company to hire some new people to fix whatever niggling irritations we have in our Apple devices that haven’t yet been fixed.
So it looks to me like a large new campus makes perfect sense. It’s big, it’s nice, and it’s as close to the the existing main Apple facility as you’re going to get without megalomaniacal dreams like tearing down De Anza College or Valley Green Apartments.
The question then, it seems to me, is purely one of the finances behind the building.
– Does it make sense for Apple to build a beautiful facility (rather than an adequate one)? I think they have no choice. They are competing with Google and MS and part of the image that is projected to your employees is the quality of the facilities — do they look like you are a world class organization?
When Steve returned to Apple, among the first things he did was minor but obvious changes around One Infinite Loop, like pulling down the pixelated Apple sculptures — message “Pixels are 1980. We’re now living in a world where real-world color gradations and video are possible on computers, so give me that, not more of what I had fifteen years ago.”
– Does it make sense for Apple to own the facility rather than some third party? Well that’s hardly a question you and I can answer. I’m sure Apple has people aware of all the relevant issues, from federal tax laws to Cupertino business incentives who will make that call fairly sensibly.
My point is that I’ve no idea about the story about those other companies, but I don’t think it’s fair to claim this is silliness on Apple’s part. There may be a common pattern of hubris followed by nemesis in this industry, but I don’t think buildings are an essential part of it.
Forget anything else, the sheer ugliness of these buildings, per the story link (Ironically Oracle’s is not terrible, just in your face modernist) is proof positive that anyone approving those plans has a screw loose.
Presumably, designs are signed off years before groundbreaking, so we might find out well before a corp looses their financial way, what is up.
Maybe we should keep an eye on planning applications, and trade binaries according to who has the better (long) and worse (short) architecture …
I think if you check the history books – though Oracle did survive the building of the campus, it too went through a MASSIVE hit shortly after the start of Redwood Shore – circa 1990. There were al sorts of problems with sales, stock meltdown and a financial deal with Nippon Steel that cushioned the blow. Don’t know al the details – but they are there to be discovered by those with the interest.
what bothers me about the much-hyped plan is the claim that it will be “green.” i think the green thing would be to fix up the property you already have, apple. i put the demolition of landmark houses in the same category, of course.
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[…] unveiling of the new Apple Campus plans yesterday reminded me of the Edifice Complex theory – that rapidly growing companies that build monumental hqs rapidly […]
loyal employees. The land was purchased but the building never started because Jobs lost his job in a political battle with then-CEO John Sculley sending Apple into its own Dark Ages.
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What ever Apple sets its goals on doing they will achieve it. If its product or a new corporate campus
edit-unless that process is covered in class-a…
process that definitely will not happen in college. in college, students are often given multiple papers to write per semester in more than one class. college students must write in an academic style that requires critical thinking with ideas and suppo…
I had to chuckle when I saw this article in Wired today…
https://www.wired.com/business/2013/12/apple-suburban-mothership/