> he owned a software tools and NT kernel consulting company where Redmond sent their engineers to learn NT kernel dev.
Apple apparently used to do something similar, internal Apple Docs were nothing compared to Jonathan Levin's books[1], so Apple would routinely buy those for their OS engineers.
It's pretty interesting to me that companies of that size can't really do these things themselves, despite being in a much better position by having access to the engineers actual source code. These third parties (or at least Levin) had to rely on reverse-engineering to a large degree.
Yeah, a consultant can make more than an FTE just by spending a lot of time reading and writing lots of documentation. Especially if they can form a business around it.
Apple apparently used to do something similar, internal Apple Docs were nothing compared to Jonathan Levin's books[1], so Apple would routinely buy those for their OS engineers.
It's pretty interesting to me that companies of that size can't really do these things themselves, despite being in a much better position by having access to the engineers actual source code. These third parties (or at least Levin) had to rely on reverse-engineering to a large degree.
[1] https://newosxbook.com