Last year, various information appeared on the internet that showed us that Apple employees work in rooms without windows, keep iDevices in boxes that are connected with chains to tables and work on fake projects, the company having an extremely elaborate security system that it had the role of protecting all new projects as well as possible. Well, not only Apple puts so much emphasis on security, because Microsoft is proceeding exactly the same as the tablet Microsoft Surface it was initially conceived in a bunker where engineers went and tested the product. Although at a certain point the team of those who interacted with Microsoft Surface grew, Microsoft kept the security level high and employees had to pass through various filters when entering/exiting the rooms where they were developing the product.
Instead, the design team initially worked in what Stevie Bathiche, Microsoft's hardware maven, calls an underground bunker with no windows. When the team outgrew that they moved above ground into a larger building; this one did have windows but it also had the kind of security you associate with bank vaults (or Microsoft's cloud data centers for services like Office 365, which have guards with guns and take biometric verification to get in). Getting into the Surface building means going through airlock-style doors; the outer door has to close before you can get through the second door and go inside, so you know there's no one sneaking in behind you. Inside the underground bunker, the Surface team were experimenting with designs, from 3D printed mockups to get the size, shape and arrangement right to testing the performance of the Wi-Fi antennas.
These measures helped those from Microsoft to keep the project secret for so long, and the same measures will help those from Apple in the future to avoid so many rumors related to their own products. Last year, those at Apple were criticized for the way they knew how to protect their projects, but they were just using methods that other companies had been applying for years and are still applying.
