I have always preferred micro companies because of the freedom to drive the chiefdom from your humble developer positions. I remember an article about an Apple engineer developing first Mac to run on X86 architecture. This is an example of micro company that Apple has always been and I doubt any company, including Google, can match it.
Apple have 60,000 employees now. They are not a micro company any more - why would they be able to feel like one? Obviously some engineers would have worked on the original x86 Macs, just as plenty of engineers at Google worked on the original Android software - that doesn't make it feel like a small company.
"They are not a micro company any more - why would they be able to feel like one?"
It can be done, but it takes a lot of work (and by "work" I mean "the pointy-hairs leaving the engineers the hell alone". That seems to require a huge effort in some companies.
Noted on the skunkworks thing. I do think in general though that managers do fairly well at leaving engineers alone at Google; the big company feel seems to come from engineering inertia a lot - inflexible coding standards, groupthink on which technologies to use, etc.
Mostly though I was hoping for a little clarification from the parent poster of why Apple should feel like a small company more than Google does - both would seem to be great places to work, but I wouldn't expect either to feel small.
