What kind of company do you work for?

A recent lecture I attended as part of my Design and Technology course was by Tom Inns. He is the new Director of Glasgow School of Art. He has spent many of his years working in a similar area of industry as I am studying so is of extra interest to me I suppose. His lecture was titled: "Why I see things the way I do".
An interesting topic which we were discussing was; what sort of company do you work for? The answer is not "well, I work for an oil company" or " I work for a company making phones" , more we were looking at how, as a designer you have to adapt and alter your designs and working methods to suit the kind of company you work for. 

Lets use Apple as an example as we discussed apple in detail. Some of the main aspects a designer would have to understand when working at apple would be:

Brand identity: Apple is one of the most obvious examples here. Instantly when you see a product (both software and hardware) you know its made by apple. All of their products and services are done in a very "apple-y" way. Just look at the image of an apple shop below. As a designer, you would have to constrain your designs to fit within that model. Although I like apple products, inreakon I would struggle to manage these constraints.

Product cycle: Apple push out new versions of their products at rates that the avrage consumer cannot keep up with. I personally think the rate at which they do this is just too fast, unnecessarily fast. I suppose this is a valid tactic in that its one of the methods that keeps them far ahead of their rivals. By constantly advancing their products in small increments they end up with a faster rate of overall advancement and thus stay the market leader. Although, we discussed the risk involved here. Could this cause them to miss out on the next technological jump. If they afe focussing too much on small changes, may they miss out on the big jumps. We can see this with the iWatch. The market now has a few successful phone/watch gadgets on the market but we are yet to see apples attempts. So, again, as a designer working for apple, how would you handle this rate of product development? It probably makes the process exciting, but the pressure to deliver may restrict and restrain your ideas/design.

Who designs the product really: Another thing we discussed in detail is who designs the product, and who makes it successful? Apple is a difficult company to give an answer for? The proucts are good, but the marketing is superb. As a designer, do you truly design the product, or do other factors and people decide how it should be designed? I had already touched on this but will be going back to it in further posts...