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Almost exactly a year ago this week, I published an article in Fortune magazine with the same

title, as you see in front of you, Inside Apple. We decided at Fortune that in Apple, we had a company

that the entire world thought they knew a lot about because the world knew about Apple's products and they knew about Apple's

advertising and its image and its brand and its logo and so on when in fact the world knew

and really still does know very little about how Apple does what it does, what goes on inside

Apple. There's a reason for that and it's a major part of my thesis

and what I've learned in researching this company intensely

over the last year, and that is that Apple doesn't want us to know

what goes on inside Apple.

Apple is professionally focused on telling us, telling you, about its products, not about it.

As a business journalist, my job is not to be concerned with what Apple is interested in us knowing,

but with what my readers at Fortune Magazine ought to know and want to know.

And as a sort of rhetorical device, I have come to have the opinion that

Apple does business differently from the way almost every other business does business, and indeed

differently from the way business is taught in business schools. And my challenge, as I've gone

around speaking about Apple, to business schools in

particular, but to other businesses and other kinds of schools, is that if Apple does things

differently than the way you're teaching it, and if Apple is the most successful, most admired,

most valuable company in the world, shouldn't you at least be asking the question,

are we teaching the right thing and should we be paying more attention to the way Apple does

...