Apple's former Senior Vice President of iOS Scott Forstall speaks at the event introducing the new... [+]
In any break-up, there's always two sides of the story.
Tonight, after Apple (AAPL) effectively fired Scott Forstall as head of iOS software, the initial reports we're getting via the Wall Street Journal and others is the Tim Cook and Apple side of the story for the need for the move now.
It can be summed up this way:
- Scott was abrasive.
- He rubbed members of the team the wrong way.
- He owned two fairly big products that got a lot of criticism in the last two years - Maps and Siri.
- He had a lot of strengths but it was seen as better for the company in the long-term to part ways now.
John Gruber has a pretty good guess (I think) that perhaps Scott was well-protected when Steve Jobs, the guy who hired him out of Stanford to work at NeXT and mentored him, was around. But now, not even 13 months after Jobs' death, Forstall doesn't have that buffer with the rest of the team and it was too much for the others to take any more.
We'll probably get Scott's take in some form in the coming weeks or months. If I had to guess, it will be something like:
- I've always been about being the best; that's what Steve taught me
- Sure I pushed other people on the team and wasn't a "yes man" - neither was Steve
- We don't have to go around apologizing at the drop of a hat. So what if I didn't want to sign that apology about Maps. I was too busy making it better.
None of us is inside the company. We don't know exactly what happened. However, this is all certainly good drama.
And once the shock of Forstall's departure has faded, get ready for the next bit of speculation: where is he going to go next?
He's technically "advising" Tim Cook until next year (which probably means the end of 2013). This means he can't be hired by someone else until after that.
But he'll certainly be courted by all of Apple's competitors - why wouldn't he be? - including Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Samsung, Amazon (AMZN) and possibly Facebook (FB) (although I have a hard time imagining Forstall reporting to Zuckerberg and biting his tongue).
The most intriguing of those possibilities would be if he took Andy Rubin's job at Google as the head of Android. It would be the ultimate twist of this drama following an Anakin Skywalker script from Star Wars.
Forstall as Anakin turns his back on Obi-Wan Kenobi and the Jedis, in order to train in the dark ways of the Force with the Emperor (Larry Page?) at Google.
The idea of it would surely make Steve Jobs ill in Heaven looking down on all this, after vowing to spend every dollar of cash on Apple's balance sheet going thermonuclear war on Android. After allowing Eric Schmidt into Apple's tent by serving on the board, witnessing the secret plans to launch iPhone, Jobs then watched Schmidt launch the Android Open Hand Set Alliance 5 months after iPhone began selling.
To now see a guy like Forstall - who'd spent 15 years at his knee, and unquestionably built a phenomenal iOS for iPhone and iPad -- go to Google to run Android, would be the most shocking and threatening of any job Forstall could take.
Will it happen? Nobody knows. And we likely won't hear about Forstall's next job for another year.
[Long AAPL]
