8 ms·

Apple Software Chief Refused to Sign Maps Apology

155 points by cremnob 14y ago

bennyg 14y ago
I feel like this is the sort of situation that shouldn't even be featured in the discussion. Who else signed the press report? It's totally irrelevant.
- javis 14y ago
  According to this article, Scott refusing to sign the apology is the reason he was fired. How is that irrelevant?
  - bennyg 14y ago
    Apple Inc. executive Scott Forstall was asked to leave the company after he refused to sign his name to a letter apologizing for shortcomings in Apple's new mapping service, according to people familiar with the matter. That's their justification. I'm still skeptical. No offense, but an apology not signed by Cook isn't an Apple apology. Tim was gonna' sign it no matter what I believe.
    - rangibaby 14y ago
      My gut says that it would have been signed by both.
      - adnrw 14y ago
        I'm guessing it wasn't a literal "signing", but rather he refused to put his name on it, probably because he disagreed with it in principle. It would have been signed by Tim Cook on behalf of everyone at Apple, but my guess is that Forstall wasn't on board, regardless of whether his name appeared on the public announcement or not.
- twoodfin 14y ago
  I agree it would have been very strange for the letter to be signed by both Tim Cook and Scott Forstall. For one thing, it would make Cook look smaller than Jobs, who, if I recall correctly, never had a co-signer on such a letter. It wouldn't have looked much better for Cook if Forstall had signed the letter alone, given its significance to the company and its customers. My guess is that Forstall refused to sign off on the public apology. Nobody was asking him to sign the letter, but he was asked by Cook to stand behind it. Failure to do so was probably the last straw for his remaining in an active role at Apple (a role he clearly was at least contemplating leaving after his big stock sale).
46Bit 14y ago
I feel it's important to emphasise this: we have nothing to suggest whether it was because the software team was forced to ship early, because Forstall didn't agree it was so far behind Maps, or other disagreements. Don't blame Forstall for not signing the letter if you don't know the cockup was his fault.
- cremnob 14y ago
  I'm more inclined to blame Forstall, especially after reading this feature on him by Businessweek. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/scott-forstall-the-sorcerers-apprentice-at-apple-10122011.html http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/scott-forstall-the-sorc...
- majormajor 14y ago
  It's been quoted to death, but I feel Jobs was right on the money when he said that at the executive level, there's no "it's not my fault." It was at the very least his responsibility, and this story paints him as not accepting that responsibility. That doesn't look good. If the story is true, I'd consider it a big enough disagreement to remove someone over.
  - phaus 14y ago
    You can be an executive and still be in a situation where a higher ranking executive can override you even when you are the domain expert and they aren't. I don't know if that's what happened here or not, but if it did, then there is in fact such thing as "it's not my fault." If Steve Jobs was talking about himself when he made that statement, then it's spot on. He micromanaged the shit out of that company and nearly always got his way. Fortunately, he did a hell of a job. If he screwed up though, he would have had not a single person to blame but himself, because he personally called most of the shots. While I haven't been an executive at a billion dollar company, I have a good amount of leadership experience from my time in the military. I always try to be blatantly honest with myself and others. If I personally fuck something up, I tend to immediately own up to it and propose a solution. However, there have been a few very rare occasions where I've either had myself and my team thrown under the bus for something that was beyond our control, or failed to complete a task because it was simply impossible to achieve under the given deadline. Only a coward would let someone place undeserved blame on himself or his subordinates.
jpdoctor 14y ago
Lopping off a senior exec over the mapping fiasco is completely warranted, but here's the next problem: The exec had several people feeding him information that the mapping app was somehow acceptable. If Tim Cook does his job right: There will be several of those underling heads rolling, either by Tim himself or some one who takes over Forstall's area. (And which one of those two possibilities will tell us a lot about Tim Cook.)
- smegel 14y ago
  > The exec had several people feeding him information that the mapping app was somehow acceptable. That might be an excuse Tim Cook himself can reasonably use, but not the exec directly responsible for the development of the new Maps app. He simply can't say he was getting information from a small number of direct underlings - he should have been in the trenches talking to the developers, testers and beta users and getting feedback directly. He was putting his reputation on the line by being the original public presenter for the new Maps, and if he was prepared to stand up in front of the world and say "this is great" he should have first been prepared to dig a little deeper into the true nature of the new app.
  - wololo 14y ago
    http://quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/How-well-does-Apples-Directly-Responsible-Individual-DRI-model-work-in-practice http://quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/How-well-does-Apples-Directly-R... on Directly Responsible Individuals
  - jpdoctor 14y ago
    > He simply can't say he was getting information from a small number of direct underlings - he should have been in the trenches talking to the developers, testers and beta users and getting feedback directly. True enough, but my point is that there is a bigger problem: He ran an org in which nobody tackled him in the hallway and said "WTF This is a piece of crap! We can't release such a POS, and if you do I quit!" An organization is not fixed by chopping only one head, there are no doubt lieutenants that need to be axed.
23david 14y ago
Sounds like a good move. It's important to signal to the entire Apple organization that nobody is untouchable if they screw up. Apple's culture is generally pretty tolerant of mistakes as long as people fix them quickly. I think in this instance, the problem was that 1) He didn't publicly accept responsibility for the problem. and 2) He couldn't fix the problems fast enough. I know that right after the maps issues came to light, I suddenly got a bunch of recruiting emails from the Apple mapping team. Sounds like the team was caught flat-footed and didn't really have a solid plan to immediately fix things. When you have a pressing and urgent systems engineering problem, I definitely think it's a bad idea to suddenly distract your team with tons of recruiting interviews. Building a good team takes a lot of time and focus. I would normally assume that Apple would transfer their best engineers from other teams to fix the maps app, but maybe Scott didn't have enough goodwill built up within the organization to make that happen.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Hmm, sounds like the Apple variation of the 3 envelopes joke. I expect the Scott is going take a lot of the heat here as the designated person but with most things I expect the story is more nuanced. This account is written to portray Scott as the bad guy, one could speculate that perhaps he had been arguing all along that there needed to be a different option, which no one accepted, and when the choice to ship turned out to be a poor one and he was asked to take the blame for it, he might have said "No way, I told you we shouldn't ship it, you overrode me, you sign it." The version with Scott as the hero, refusing to compromise his principles, also fits all the 'known' facts (maps kinda sucks, Tim signed the apology) and might be communicated by nameless "people familiar with the matter" who liked Scott. But we won't know. Some folks will know, and some folks will think they know, but having been high enough in the food chain to directly witness some executive shifts like this first hand, and to see how they got spun to the public and to others. the one thing I know is that those of us out here in the peanut gallery, we don't have an ice cube's chance in hell of knowing the 'real' story.
- arn 14y ago
  The other evidence though is that Forstall has been depicted as "the bad guy" for a long time. Well before he was expected to be departing. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/scott-forstall-the-sorcerers-apprentice-at-apple-10122011.html http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/scott-forstall-the-sorc... He was even described as CEO-in-Waiting. Even then, the same things were said about his personality conflicts with others: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/17/scott-forstall-is-apples-ceo-in-waiting-says-new-book/ http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/17/scott-forstall-is-app...
  - gurkendoktor 14y ago
    > Forstall has been depicted as "the bad guy" for a long time. > personality conflicts with others: The same things have been said about Steve Jobs over and over.
    - rhizome 14y ago
      Over the years I have certainly seen what I think are cases of hindsight or survivorship bias where people think "if I want to be Steve Jobs I have to be a jerk!" People can work this in a PR push like Forstall may have done in the BW profile.
SHOwnsYou 14y ago
I hope I'm reading the situation incorrectly, but all I get out of this is that Forstall has an epic ego. He is asked to sign an apology letter for the short comings of an app that he was in charge of and was at least confident enough in to present to the world. When it was time to pay the piper and accept responsibility for the app he told the world was great, he shirks all responsibility. I fully support the decision to remove him from his position.
- Volpe 14y ago
  Well sure if you believe that's how it happened. Or, he was against releasing, but was overridden (by Cook perhaps), then refused to apologise because it wasn't his mistake... The reality is, we don't, and probably won't know. Seems strange though, that Forestall did exceptionally good releases [1] up until iOS 6 and then all of a sudden he just dropped the ball with maps... [1] Excluding the fact that new iOSes generally suck for older iPhones, and force a hardware upgrade.
  - SHOwnsYou 14y ago
    How it actually happened doesn't matter. If you've accepted the role of svp of IOS software, you're at fault if there is horribly broken IOS software.
  - droithomme 14y ago
    iOS is behind Apple's present riches and Forstall is the hard ass visionary genius that made that happen. Before that, he was a primary architect on OS X before it was even called OS X. He's the single most important engineer at Apple (since Bertrand Serlet was tossed out last year). To pooh pooh this guy's contributions as many are doing, while celebrating Cook as some great visionary genius is totally absurd. Cook is a bean counter with no vision. He is very good at bean counting and has a lot of success at it. He is not appropriate as anything more than transitionary CEO for a visionary company. Replace visionaries with bean counters that have allegiance to the established hierarchical order of bean counters? This works well for commodity companies that sell fizzy sugar water. Will it work for Apple this time around? Last time they went this route with Sculley there were some problems.
swang 14y ago
I have no doubt in my mind that Apple itself leaked this info to WSJ. What is surprising is how willing they were to throw him under the bus. Would be interesting to find out what was behind all this. Maybe to pre-empt anything Forstall could say against Apple/Cook or other Apple Execs in future interviews?
- jblock 14y ago
  Count this towards my ignorance towards the business world, but are executives of large companies really that petty and childish?
  - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
    It's not so much as petty as it is a need to control the direction of the conversation. By placing a stake in the ground, the conversation will stay in the general area that the company (and I'm not including only Apple here) wants it to. Part of the field called "public relations".
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - fastball 14y ago
      ^ a phenomenon known as "anchoring", for anyone interested. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring
  - laurentoget 14y ago
    the game to get into that seat is not exactly set in favor of the magnanimous nice guys.
    - beedogs 14y ago
      It's mostly sociopaths in the upper ranks of companies.
  - 14y ago
mrharrison 14y ago
Maps are really freaking hard to make. I wouldn't of signed it either. There was no need apologize in the first place. Jobs wouldn't of apologized either; I think we are starting to see the downturn in apple. We all make mistakes but its better to look strong instead of weak in business.
- Shorel 14y ago
  Operating systems are just as hard, yet they are routinely released, patched, upgraded and they usually work.
guelo 14y ago
> Mr. Forstall also recently sent some members of Apple's iOS software team an email saying he felt the group wasn't working on enough big ideas in mobile software He had that right.
- roc 14y ago
  But whose fault would that be, if not his? Wouldn't it be the job of the head of iOS development to identify the ideas worth pursuing and setting the teams/projects/schedules accordingly? If the guy ostensibly setting the feature list sends out an email saying "you guys aren't making the right stuff" ... how can you parse that in a way other than "asshole"/"not taking responsibility"? Or does Apple have an internal project structure more along the lines of Valve?
pootch 14y ago
Who knows what the previous history is, but given the way maps rolled out, maybe Forstall could have simply given credence to the notion that maps was just a beginning instead of giving in to the blowhard sales pitches of apple keynotes. Apple says that Apple TV is just a hobby, maybe he should have said that Maps is just the beginning of a new road.
chj 14y ago
I don't think this has anything to do with Scott's departure. He sold most of his shares 6 months ago.. It's time for him to leave and build his own company.
_djo_ 14y ago
I think this is about more than the signing of the apology letter, it's also about the way that Forstall presented Apple Maps to the world as a perfect finished product even as he reportedly knew that there were serious flaws in the data. That's what made the apology necessary. Apple Maps should have been presented as a first step in a great solution and the issues acknowledged (with promised improvements) far earlier. Forstall has been a wonderful engineer and manager at Apple and he is largely responsible for the success of iOS, but letting him avoid taking responsibility for this might've been poisonous to Apple in the long term.
Mordor 14y ago
Sounds like a typical dictatorship changeover. Leaders forced to sign statements they don't agree with, then removed when they don't. Failures blamed on sabotage. Everyone chanting the new tune... while the economy fails.
smackfu 14y ago
Funny thing is that if this leaked out before he got fired, I think it would have been seen as a positive thing for Forstall. That he stood up for the Apple Maps just like a lot of Apple fans, and that it was just the press making a big deal out of nothing.
pilsetnieks 14y ago
> The 43-year-old Mr. Forstall recently told people that there is no "decider" now that Mr. Jobs is gone I guess they just made room for one.

155 points by cremnob 14y ago

I feel like this is the sort of situation that shouldn't even be featured in the discussion. Who else signed the press report? It's totally irrelevant.

javis 14y ago
According to this article, Scott refusing to sign the apology is the reason he was fired. How is that irrelevant?
- bennyg 14y ago
  Apple Inc. executive Scott Forstall was asked to leave the company after he refused to sign his name to a letter apologizing for shortcomings in Apple's new mapping service, according to people familiar with the matter. That's their justification. I'm still skeptical. No offense, but an apology not signed by Cook isn't an Apple apology. Tim was gonna' sign it no matter what I believe.
  - rangibaby 14y ago
    My gut says that it would have been signed by both.
    - adnrw 14y ago
      I'm guessing it wasn't a literal "signing", but rather he refused to put his name on it, probably because he disagreed with it in principle. It would have been signed by Tim Cook on behalf of everyone at Apple, but my guess is that Forstall wasn't on board, regardless of whether his name appeared on the public announcement or not.
twoodfin 14y ago
I agree it would have been very strange for the letter to be signed by both Tim Cook and Scott Forstall. For one thing, it would make Cook look smaller than Jobs, who, if I recall correctly, never had a co-signer on such a letter. It wouldn't have looked much better for Cook if Forstall had signed the letter alone, given its significance to the company and its customers. My guess is that Forstall refused to sign off on the public apology. Nobody was asking him to sign the letter, but he was asked by Cook to stand behind it. Failure to do so was probably the last straw for his remaining in an active role at Apple (a role he clearly was at least contemplating leaving after his big stock sale).

46Bit 14y ago

I feel it's important to emphasise this: we have nothing to suggest whether it was because the software team was forced to ship early, because Forstall didn't agree it was so far behind Maps, or other disagreements. Don't blame Forstall for not signing the letter if you don't know the cockup was his fault.

cremnob 14y ago
I'm more inclined to blame Forstall, especially after reading this feature on him by Businessweek. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/scott-forstall-the-sorcerers-apprentice-at-apple-10122011.html http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/scott-forstall-the-sorc...
majormajor 14y ago
It's been quoted to death, but I feel Jobs was right on the money when he said that at the executive level, there's no "it's not my fault." It was at the very least his responsibility, and this story paints him as not accepting that responsibility. That doesn't look good. If the story is true, I'd consider it a big enough disagreement to remove someone over.
- phaus 14y ago
  You can be an executive and still be in a situation where a higher ranking executive can override you even when you are the domain expert and they aren't. I don't know if that's what happened here or not, but if it did, then there is in fact such thing as "it's not my fault." If Steve Jobs was talking about himself when he made that statement, then it's spot on. He micromanaged the shit out of that company and nearly always got his way. Fortunately, he did a hell of a job. If he screwed up though, he would have had not a single person to blame but himself, because he personally called most of the shots. While I haven't been an executive at a billion dollar company, I have a good amount of leadership experience from my time in the military. I always try to be blatantly honest with myself and others. If I personally fuck something up, I tend to immediately own up to it and propose a solution. However, there have been a few very rare occasions where I've either had myself and my team thrown under the bus for something that was beyond our control, or failed to complete a task because it was simply impossible to achieve under the given deadline. Only a coward would let someone place undeserved blame on himself or his subordinates.

jpdoctor 14y ago

Lopping off a senior exec over the mapping fiasco is completely warranted, but here's the next problem: The exec had several people feeding him information that the mapping app was somehow acceptable. If Tim Cook does his job right: There will be several of those underling heads rolling, either by Tim himself or some one who takes over Forstall's area. (And which one of those two possibilities will tell us a lot about Tim Cook.)

smegel 14y ago
> The exec had several people feeding him information that the mapping app was somehow acceptable. That might be an excuse Tim Cook himself can reasonably use, but not the exec directly responsible for the development of the new Maps app. He simply can't say he was getting information from a small number of direct underlings - he should have been in the trenches talking to the developers, testers and beta users and getting feedback directly. He was putting his reputation on the line by being the original public presenter for the new Maps, and if he was prepared to stand up in front of the world and say "this is great" he should have first been prepared to dig a little deeper into the true nature of the new app.
- wololo 14y ago
  http://quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/How-well-does-Apples-Directly-Responsible-Individual-DRI-model-work-in-practice http://quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/How-well-does-Apples-Directly-R... on Directly Responsible Individuals
- jpdoctor 14y ago
  > He simply can't say he was getting information from a small number of direct underlings - he should have been in the trenches talking to the developers, testers and beta users and getting feedback directly. True enough, but my point is that there is a bigger problem: He ran an org in which nobody tackled him in the hallway and said "WTF This is a piece of crap! We can't release such a POS, and if you do I quit!" An organization is not fixed by chopping only one head, there are no doubt lieutenants that need to be axed.

23david 14y ago

Sounds like a good move. It's important to signal to the entire Apple organization that nobody is untouchable if they screw up. Apple's culture is generally pretty tolerant of mistakes as long as people fix them quickly. I think in this instance, the problem was that 1) He didn't publicly accept responsibility for the problem. and 2) He couldn't fix the problems fast enough. I know that right after the maps issues came to light, I suddenly got a bunch of recruiting emails from the Apple mapping team. Sounds like the team was caught flat-footed and didn't really have a solid plan to immediately fix things. When you have a pressing and urgent systems engineering problem, I definitely think it's a bad idea to suddenly distract your team with tons of recruiting interviews. Building a good team takes a lot of time and focus. I would normally assume that Apple would transfer their best engineers from other teams to fix the maps app, but maybe Scott didn't have enough goodwill built up within the organization to make that happen.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Hmm, sounds like the Apple variation of the 3 envelopes joke. I expect the Scott is going take a lot of the heat here as the designated person but with most things I expect the story is more nuanced. This account is written to portray Scott as the bad guy, one could speculate that perhaps he had been arguing all along that there needed to be a different option, which no one accepted, and when the choice to ship turned out to be a poor one and he was asked to take the blame for it, he might have said "No way, I told you we shouldn't ship it, you overrode me, you sign it." The version with Scott as the hero, refusing to compromise his principles, also fits all the 'known' facts (maps kinda sucks, Tim signed the apology) and might be communicated by nameless "people familiar with the matter" who liked Scott. But we won't know. Some folks will know, and some folks will think they know, but having been high enough in the food chain to directly witness some executive shifts like this first hand, and to see how they got spun to the public and to others. the one thing I know is that those of us out here in the peanut gallery, we don't have an ice cube's chance in hell of knowing the 'real' story.

arn 14y ago
The other evidence though is that Forstall has been depicted as "the bad guy" for a long time. Well before he was expected to be departing. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/scott-forstall-the-sorcerers-apprentice-at-apple-10122011.html http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/scott-forstall-the-sorc... He was even described as CEO-in-Waiting. Even then, the same things were said about his personality conflicts with others: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/17/scott-forstall-is-apples-ceo-in-waiting-says-new-book/ http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/17/scott-forstall-is-app...
- gurkendoktor 14y ago
  > Forstall has been depicted as "the bad guy" for a long time. > personality conflicts with others: The same things have been said about Steve Jobs over and over.
  - rhizome 14y ago
    Over the years I have certainly seen what I think are cases of hindsight or survivorship bias where people think "if I want to be Steve Jobs I have to be a jerk!" People can work this in a PR push like Forstall may have done in the BW profile.

SHOwnsYou 14y ago

I hope I'm reading the situation incorrectly, but all I get out of this is that Forstall has an epic ego. He is asked to sign an apology letter for the short comings of an app that he was in charge of and was at least confident enough in to present to the world. When it was time to pay the piper and accept responsibility for the app he told the world was great, he shirks all responsibility. I fully support the decision to remove him from his position.

Volpe 14y ago
Well sure if you believe that's how it happened. Or, he was against releasing, but was overridden (by Cook perhaps), then refused to apologise because it wasn't his mistake... The reality is, we don't, and probably won't know. Seems strange though, that Forestall did exceptionally good releases [1] up until iOS 6 and then all of a sudden he just dropped the ball with maps... [1] Excluding the fact that new iOSes generally suck for older iPhones, and force a hardware upgrade.
- SHOwnsYou 14y ago
  How it actually happened doesn't matter. If you've accepted the role of svp of IOS software, you're at fault if there is horribly broken IOS software.
- droithomme 14y ago
  iOS is behind Apple's present riches and Forstall is the hard ass visionary genius that made that happen. Before that, he was a primary architect on OS X before it was even called OS X. He's the single most important engineer at Apple (since Bertrand Serlet was tossed out last year). To pooh pooh this guy's contributions as many are doing, while celebrating Cook as some great visionary genius is totally absurd. Cook is a bean counter with no vision. He is very good at bean counting and has a lot of success at it. He is not appropriate as anything more than transitionary CEO for a visionary company. Replace visionaries with bean counters that have allegiance to the established hierarchical order of bean counters? This works well for commodity companies that sell fizzy sugar water. Will it work for Apple this time around? Last time they went this route with Sculley there were some problems.

swang 14y ago

I have no doubt in my mind that Apple itself leaked this info to WSJ. What is surprising is how willing they were to throw him under the bus. Would be interesting to find out what was behind all this. Maybe to pre-empt anything Forstall could say against Apple/Cook or other Apple Execs in future interviews?

jblock 14y ago
Count this towards my ignorance towards the business world, but are executives of large companies really that petty and childish?
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  It's not so much as petty as it is a need to control the direction of the conversation. By placing a stake in the ground, the conversation will stay in the general area that the company (and I'm not including only Apple here) wants it to. Part of the field called "public relations".
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - fastball 14y ago
    ^ a phenomenon known as "anchoring", for anyone interested. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring
- laurentoget 14y ago
  the game to get into that seat is not exactly set in favor of the magnanimous nice guys.
  - beedogs 14y ago
    It's mostly sociopaths in the upper ranks of companies.
- 14y ago

mrharrison 14y ago

Maps are really freaking hard to make. I wouldn't of signed it either. There was no need apologize in the first place. Jobs wouldn't of apologized either; I think we are starting to see the downturn in apple. We all make mistakes but its better to look strong instead of weak in business.

Shorel 14y ago
Operating systems are just as hard, yet they are routinely released, patched, upgraded and they usually work.

guelo 14y ago

> Mr. Forstall also recently sent some members of Apple's iOS software team an email saying he felt the group wasn't working on enough big ideas in mobile software He had that right.

roc 14y ago
But whose fault would that be, if not his? Wouldn't it be the job of the head of iOS development to identify the ideas worth pursuing and setting the teams/projects/schedules accordingly? If the guy ostensibly setting the feature list sends out an email saying "you guys aren't making the right stuff" ... how can you parse that in a way other than "asshole"/"not taking responsibility"? Or does Apple have an internal project structure more along the lines of Valve?

pootch 14y ago

Who knows what the previous history is, but given the way maps rolled out, maybe Forstall could have simply given credence to the notion that maps was just a beginning instead of giving in to the blowhard sales pitches of apple keynotes. Apple says that Apple TV is just a hobby, maybe he should have said that Maps is just the beginning of a new road.

chj 14y ago

I don't think this has anything to do with Scott's departure. He sold most of his shares 6 months ago.. It's time for him to leave and build his own company.

_djo_ 14y ago

I think this is about more than the signing of the apology letter, it's also about the way that Forstall presented Apple Maps to the world as a perfect finished product even as he reportedly knew that there were serious flaws in the data. That's what made the apology necessary. Apple Maps should have been presented as a first step in a great solution and the issues acknowledged (with promised improvements) far earlier. Forstall has been a wonderful engineer and manager at Apple and he is largely responsible for the success of iOS, but letting him avoid taking responsibility for this might've been poisonous to Apple in the long term.

Mordor 14y ago

Sounds like a typical dictatorship changeover. Leaders forced to sign statements they don't agree with, then removed when they don't. Failures blamed on sabotage. Everyone chanting the new tune... while the economy fails.

smackfu 14y ago

Funny thing is that if this leaked out before he got fired, I think it would have been seen as a positive thing for Forstall. That he stood up for the Apple Maps just like a lot of Apple fans, and that it was just the press making a big deal out of nothing.

pilsetnieks 14y ago

> The 43-year-old Mr. Forstall recently told people that there is no "decider" now that Mr. Jobs is gone I guess they just made room for one.