I was also a corporate stooge (at both Apple and Microsoft). One of the biggest differences in culture was exactly this point. At Apple, it was encouraged to share your successes and failures in real time across teams. At Microsoft, there was so much infighting and competition that you tended to share nothing until you were ready to release. For example, someone on the Windows team wouldn't want to give away a cool solution that could be "stolen" by the dev tools team. This resulted in walled gardens that were protected at all costs.