Even though it’s obvious that Scott Forstall was canned by Tim Cook, he’s being kept on for a year as an advisor to the CEO.
This seems to make no sense, but here’s why:
It’s all about preventing Forstall from jumping ship. Noncompete agreements are not enforceable in California. They are in other states and jurisdictions, but not in Apple’s home state.
Obviously, an executive of Forstall’s stature would be snapped up in a second by a rivals like Google or Microsoft.
Details of Forstall’s departure deal with Apple won’t be made known until Apple files papers with the SEC, but his new role as an advisor to Tim Cook is a bullshit job to keep him out of the job market.
Apple did exactly the same thing with Tony Fadell, the former head of the iPod division. When Fadell left the company in 2006, Apple made him an advisor to Steve Jobs for a year. He was given a big salary and stock grant to keep him happy. Several years later, he emerged as the founder of Nest, a company that makes smart thermostats, and is completely unrelated to smartphones or media players.
Even though Forstall will be held as an advisor, Apple can’t handcuff him forever. Forstall is too talented to not become a major player in the tech industry after a break from Apple.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
7 responses to “Scott Forstall: Why Is Apple Keeping Him As An Advisor?”
Wow. I didn’t know he was “fired” but that’s a typical way for it to go. Most of the press claim he’s leaving, and fanboys have turned this into an indictment of Apple and some notion that he will work for Google or Samsung. Wait, so these fanboys hate Apple products, but want their head of iOS to work for Google or Samsung, in their fantasy corporation? Huh? I can’t stand fanboys — be they of the Apple, Google, or Microsoft kind.
The higher up you are, the more “firing” is often transformed into a sinecure. I do know that Forstall has a reputation for being difficult and arrogant. Ive and Mansfield requested to have Tim Cook present whenever they met with him. Personally, I don’t think this is a bad thing for Apple. iOS is great, but it could be better. There are some glaring flaws, particularly with the bundled apps. I’m not talking all the hype about Maps. For all the kerfuffle, it is actually a decent app. I was listening to music last night — iPad to Apple TV. It crashed twice in two hours, even though I had rebooted both my Apple TV and iPad. Beyond this annoyance, some of the bundled iOS apps are bad. Music, for example, has some bugs with making playlists, tracks shown “greyed out”, as if they were added to a playlist, when they’re not, missing album artwork (from albums I bought on iTunes)… Reminders was horrible, but they fixed it in iOS 6. It took them a year to add the ability to move items on a list?!? That seems like something that should be there from day 1.
iOS isn’t that great. To be fair, it is a relatively new OS and runs on minimal hardware. That said, I never felt it was completely up to Apple quality. It’s not like Mac OS X, which is near-flawless. But if it wasn’t for my frustration with iOS, I would have never started my website, which is getting hits galore.
Well, it was good to know Forstall was fired. The Silicon Valley tolerates prima donnas to some extent, but when they make people’s lives miserable, they have to go. I don’t know what exactly precipitated this, but you can even see when Forstall presents at a keynote, he seems pretty arrogant. I have read quite a lot about how difficult he can be. No doubt, he’s intelligent. There are plenty of people who are intelligent and team players. From what I understand, he fancied himself as Steve Jobs Jr. Better for him to get the ax (really it’s the nerf ax for senior officers) than for him to rise to power as CEO or something.
He’s a scapegoat for sure. He’s blamed for a lackluster operating system. Android was already ahead of it and today it buried iOS once and for all. There will be more people cut loose for sure, this is just the first. Wait and see. I predicted Forstall’s departure 6 months ago and got banned from this site.
I honestly have no idea, he’s not moved iOS on by that far since it’s inception and map’s was a cluster f&*%k, still trying to figure out what the hell he was worth apart from going on stage and showing us a bit of the same, iOS/Mountain lion deserve more integration but with his standards god help us
I can’t wait until my nexus gets a felt game table and a paper shredder.
I think you got banned because you say a lot of stupid things. iOS is supposed to be simple. That’s the point. You call it lackluster because you think everybody is on your level when it comes to technology. What makes Apple what it is is the fact that they have the ability to understand the user. Apple is the best tech company in the world for this.
You know he’s going to end up being the CEO of some other company some day. Hell, HP might buy him up and resurrect Web OS. Scott was a key player in iOS. Saying that iOS isn’t that great is kind of stupid to say. iOS is the reason why Apple is a house hold name outside of iPod. Do you not realize that Scott was responsible for changing the computer landscape forever?
Steve personally put Scott in charge. Did he seem a little arrogant? You know who else was arrogant? Mr. Jobs himself. The only difference is that Scott was personally responsible for Apple’s return. Steve was great at making sure the teams stayed on task.
Mac OS X is not near flawless. How many people have trouble just downloading OS X? Mountain Lion, like Lion, is rough around the edges. Sometimes applications quit unexpectedly Safari always crashes, and there’s still a lot of fat in OS X like the widgets page. That’s the most useless portion of OS X. On top of all that, as of late, OS X has just been acquiring iOS’ biggest features.
Near flawless my ass…
It’s about time. Can’t wait for iOS 7.