Eat your own dog food: a lesson from Apple (and Google)

Apologies in advance for the near-rant tone of this blog entry.

I want to share with you all a couple of quotes that represent supreme genius--and that is a big statement from someone who is decidedly anti-Apple:

"The fact that Apple sees the iPhone as a hugely important platform for the future can be seen in the company's decision to give a top-of-the-line iPhone to every Apple employee, even part-timers. This is frigging brilliant. EVERY Apple employee becomes an iPhone evangelist. EVERY Apple employee participates in ongoing stress testing and customer feedback. You can bet that every technical problem will be addressed quickly, simply because the entire company will be experiencing these problems."
From: Faster iPhone faster! Kill!! Kill!!: Expect a 3G iPhone by Christmas.

Forget the economics of the decision for a moment and marvel at the sheer brilliance. EVERYONE in the company is a user, an evangelist, a tester, a convert, and an eventual expert. But wait--and this is really key--when there is a problem, EVERYONE KNOWS and problems get corrected faster.

So why would I take the time to share this when I am no fan of Steve Jobs et al? Because Google, whom I do have respect for, does the same thing:

"Google workers use the company's tools intensively. The most obvious tool is the Web, with an internal Web page for virtually every project and every task. They are all indexed and available to project participants on an as-needed basis. We also make extensive use of other information-management tools, some of which are eventually rolled out as products. For example, one of the reasons for Gmail's success is that it was beta tested within the company for many months. The use of e-mail is critical within the organization, so Gmail had to be tuned to satisfy the needs of some of our most demanding customers­our knowledge workers."
From: Google: Ten Golden Rules

Does this mean that my company should provide us all with a their latest and greatest mobile phone? I cannot fathom the practicality of it, only that other companies, who have also staked their future on certain lines of business, see fit to do so. Honestly, I had to drop my company phone just to get a technology refresh from 3+ year old palm-based devices.