Welcome to the Jony Ive Era
Here’s a good look at what’s going on at Apple, by Bloomberg’s Peter Burrows and Adam Satariano, as industrial design genius Jony Ive broadens his duties. If you missed the announcement, Ive will now oversee “Human Interface” at Apple — including software — as long-time iOS boss Scott Forstall exits.
It’s a shame that Forstall and Ive couldn’t make it work with Steve Jobs gone; some of the products they’ve made over the years are among the best ever designed. So it goes. But I’m very excited to see what Jony Ive does with Apple’s software interfaces, especially iOS.
Firing someone as senior and as integral as Forstall couldn’t have been an easy call for Tim Cook, and Steve Jobs might not have made the same decision. But this is Cook’s Apple now. And the argument that Jony Ive’s creativity is more important to Apple’s future than Scott Forstall’s engineering leadership is defensible (if you had to choose). At least it’s going to be interesting.
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