Scott who?

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The exit of Apple Inc’s longtime mobile software products chief may be a surprise, but a band of able executives led by Tim Cook and a bigger role for design boss Jonathan Ive meant the company was in good hands, analysts said on Tuesday.

And that’s why Tim Cook put Ive in that position. It instantly calmed everything down.



  • lucascott

    Given some of the major bugs in iOS 6 including the breaking of several previous working features, I’m not shocked or upset about Scott leaving. He let me down and it particularly stings about all the hype about the cute ‘shadows’ and such. Don’t spend time on that junk and then give me non working software that led to me spending two hours on the phone with AT&T because I acquired almost $1000 in overages in 3 days that I was allegedly connected to wifi the whole time (and your software said I had zero cell data usage during that time). And then of course there’s no apology for that stuff.

  • rwitt

    Jony Ive being in charge of all UI is a very good thing. Hopefully skeuomorphic design in iOS and the Mac has turned a corner and we’ll see less of it now.

    • http://www.theuniversalsteve.com SSteve

      Yes! Tear the stitches out of iCal!

  • Jeff Battersby

    I’ve only ever wondered why Forstall was around. I know he was responsible for making iOS what it is, and that’s a definitely a feather in his cap, but every time he stood on stage I felt like I was listening to a BAD used car salesman. Seemed to be the least trustworthy of all the top Apple execs.

    This move is a good thing.

  • Adriano Geletes

    Steve Jobs once said at D8 in 2010:” We are organized like a startup!” If Forstall wasn’t the right person who could fill in the position as a SVP of iOS, then he has to leave. People come and go in tech business every day and maybe he is coming back in a few years, when he’s again the right one for maybe another position at Apple. If not, no one has to worry, there are a lot of great people out there who can fill in and be much more creative as Forstall was at his entire time at Apple.

  • lkalliance

    This is an interesting event to parse out. I have an acquaintance that has worked with Apple for several years now, who told me that once Steve Jobs was gone there was more consensus-gathering than there was before, and apparently more infighting (I do not remember if he told me that directly or if I inferred it). From what I’ve read (and probably most of us on this site have as well) Scott Forstall was a very divisive infighter.

    I wonder about whether this is the real turn of the screw for Apple. Not necessarily a catastrophic one or even a bad one…just a moment of cultural change. Steve Jobs was an autocrat (if I’m using the term correctly) and left in place a team…but for Apple to continue to be the same kind of culture there would need to be a new autocrat. From the impressions I’ve gathered reading about him, Scott Forstall would seem to be someone that could be that. Is Tim Cook? Is Phil Schiller? Eddie Cue? None of them seem be that type, but that’s just impressions based only on the same presentations we’ve all seen.

    There are some things that Steve Jobs was, besides perfectionist, autocrat, etc. He was a man with a lot of product credibility. Even though there were missteps, he was there at the beginning of it all, and has a HUGE amount of successes. He had a reputation of not really being an engineer but at being a marketer…what he really was was the world’s greatest project manager. But no one dared go up against him once he returned. Forstall, clearly, doesn’t inspire the same fear. So would he have been an able replacement for Jobs’ personality? Or would it have been a disaster?

    Tim Cook also has great credibility in operations. Whether he does as a product guy I think is still an open question that hasn’t been answered yet. Nor does he need to be, if he has the wisdom to have excellent product guys around him. But this all feels like a turning point where the new Apple culture is about to be defined. Might be very similar to the old one, but very much feels to me that it is/will be different.