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THERE HAS BEEN a massive shake up in the executive ranks at Apple.
Scott Forstall, the brilliant, but polarizing SVP who leads iOS, is out. As is John Browett who took over Apple’s retail operations earlier this year.
Forstall’s responsibilities are going to be split amongst three long time Apple execs:
Jony Ive, who leads hardware design, will lead Human Interface across the company.
Eddy Cue, who leads Internet services, will take over Siri and Maps.
Craig Federighi, who runs OSX, will also lead iOS development.
Apple is going to be looking for a new head of retail. Browett’s departure is surprising because of how short his tenure is with the company. However, he has been a controversial figure.
He was cutting hours, and trying to make Apple stores more profitable, which seemed silly considering Apple makes a lot of money, and its stores are about providing excellent customer service.
Forstall is a much bigger surprise than Browett. Forstall has been at Apple basically his entire career. He was seen as the CEO-in-waiting, a Steve Jobs-like perfectionist who could one day lead Apple.
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He led iOS after winning a brutal internal competition to design the iPhone’s software. On the way to winning he made many enemies. Reportedly, Tony Fadell, who is considered the godfather of the iPod left Apple after losing out on designing iPhone software to Forstall.
Forstall also reportedly couldn’t be in the same room as Ive or Bob Mansfield. Incidentally, Mansfield got a new job today, too. Mansfield will be in charge of a new group called, “Technologies,” which will work on wireless technology and semiconductors.
After scoring a big early victory with iOS, Forstall oversaw two of Apple’s biggest let downs in recent years: Maps and Siri. Siri, which is supposed to be voice-based personal assistance software has been a big flop. And Maps was so bad, CEO Tim Cook apologized to customers over it.
Forstall was also said to be leading the charge for Apple’s design to be skeuomorphic, which is a fancy way of saying making digital things look like their analog counterparts.
For instance, in the new Apple Podcasts app, there are tape decks playing. There is no reason to make a digital version of tape decks. This design language was said to be controversial inside Apple, and it could have contributed to his departure.
You can read Apple’s press release on the changes here.
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As far as I know they are at the testing stage for 6.1 , seems to be a lot to fix from ISO 6, but was just worn ding did anyone hear a date for release
GoGo99, it’s not working fine, I’ve never had as many bugs in an iOS release as I do 6, and as Maps is an intergral app to iOS, yes a fix will require an iOS update.
Ok Partysauras, I personally haven’t had any issues or bugs so far, neither has the other half. Are you holding yours right? Also as the maps are not actually “in the Phone”, but in the cloud I thought they could simply fix it as they go…
Tim Cook recruited Browett, former boss of Dixons, and gave him a $56 million “golden hello” for going to Apple. Cook at the time enthused about Browett’s commitment to customer service. Which was surprising given that Dixons never had a glowing reputation on the customer service front. So, just barely 6 months later he is given the boot as he clearly did not have a clue about the ethos of Apple. Instead, he started to sacrifice Apple’s deserved reputation as a great service provider in their shops in the interests of cost cutting (something that second rate CEOs on this side of the pond have adopted with dreary regularity over the years.) In fairness to Cook, he has recognised early on that he made a mistake and had hired someone without imagination, flair or interest in great customer service and got rid of him. Maybe this whole episode might cause some of our own CEOs to think again about closing shops and reducing staff numbers in favour of technology – it might all make sense on a spreadsheet but as Tim Cook knows you cannot beat one on one interaction with a human if you want to have a reputation for great customer service. AIB, Bank of Ireland, et al please note.
“Forstall was also said to be leading the charge for Apple’s design to be skeuomorphic, which is a fancy way of saying making digital things look like their analog counterparts.”
I hate that, drives me demented! Hopefully this means a change of direction for Apple, they’ll need to change if they want to keep up.
If his software interface design skills are anything like his hardware design skills it should be interesting to say the least!! the new Google Nexus interfaces are stunning, skeuomorphic design is clunky at best.
@BlackQueen, seen that before all right, but you have a point, the hardware is more skeuomorphic than one might think :-D
In any case, the macbook pro’s are slick laptops, much more so than the rest of their products, with the possible exception of the new imac, with which the comparison on that link is a stretch at best.
Also, if you look at the whole of that Braun T1000 radio, then the comparison to the G5 or 2003 Mac Pro.
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