

Apple Software Chief Refused to Sign Maps Apology - cremnob
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204840504578087192497916304.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTWhatsNewsCollection

======
ChuckMcM
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
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-
sorc...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/scott-forstall-the-sorcerers-
apprentice-at-apple-10122011.html)

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-
app...](http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/17/scott-forstall-is-apples-ceo-
in-waiting-says-new-book/)

~~~
gurkendoktor
> 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.

~~~
arn
Yes, and Steve Jobs was also ousted from Apple for (in part) that reason. One
of the articles even described Forstall as "mini-Steve".

I'm just pointing out that "Forstall was a problem" isn't a new narrative that
is being spun due to his departure, but one that has been around for some
time.

~~~
ebiester
So, what I'm hearing is that in about 10 years, Forstall will be brought to
"save" apple again?

~~~
sigzero
Forstall is no Steve Jobs.

~~~
jtbigwoo
Steve Jobs was no Steve Jobs... until later anyway.

------
guelo
> 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
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?

------
swang
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
Count this towards my ignorance towards the business world, but are executives
of large companies really that petty and childish?

~~~
SoftwareMaven
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".

~~~
fastball
^ a phenomenon known as "anchoring", for anyone interested.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring>

------
23david
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.

------
46Bit
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.

~~~
majormajor
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
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.

~~~
Anechoic
_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._

Then you quit.

~~~
zizee
_Then you quit._

Better would be to make sure that you have good documentation of the event in
the case of the shit hitting the fan.

~~~
PeterisP
As said by other posts before, that is completely irrelevant in executive
level. No one would or should care about your documentation at that point, as
it might be for rank-and-file workers.

Get convinced of the CEO strategy and execute it, or stay convinced, convince
the board and do your way - and in either case, take responsibility for
whatever happens to the company in the whole, there is no such thing as "your
separate area" or "only your direct actions/subordinates" at that level.

------
SHOwnsYou
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
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.

~~~
droithomme
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.

~~~
shinratdr
> This works well for commodity companies that sell fizzy sugar water.

Why can't you just say soda, pop or whatever regional dialect you prefer? I
don't understand why any time anyone ever says this it has to phrased in the
most condescending way possible.

~~~
droithomme
Because it's highly relevant to the story I was discussing. Jobs had asked
Sculley, head of PepsiCo at the time, Do you want to sell sugared water for
the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?"
Sculley then ran Apple from the perspective if his experience at a commodity
company, driving the company to the edge of bankruptcy and irrelevance. It
worked out well for me, I bought a lot of Apple stock at around $5 a share.
But it almost destroyed Apple.

This quote has since been simplified to asking people in technical fields if
they want to make fizzy sugar water. Familiarity with this story is widespread
in the industry and not an obscure reference, and in this case I wanted to
discuss both Jobs, Sculley, Apple, and the result of having a bean counter
type person who is excellent at reducing manufacturing costs within a
commodity company be in charge of a company whose entire value is based on not
being a commodity.

------
jpdoctor
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
> 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.

~~~
jpdoctor
> _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.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
_He ran an org in which nobody tackled him in the hallway_

Do you know that they didn't? And there is a lot of gray area between tackling
and release that a good manager should be able to dive into.

~~~
jpdoctor
> _Do you know that they didn't?_

I know that they either didn't tell him, or didn't tell him in a manner that
he listened.

It's really not rocket science: An organization is not fixed by chopping only
one head.

~~~
trhtrsh
Clearly, removing everyone involved in failure is the route to success.

~~~
jpdoctor
Try seeing at least one shade of gray, you'll go farther.

------
mrharrison
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
Operating systems are just as hard, yet they are routinely released, patched,
upgraded and they usually work.

------
bennyg
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
According to this article, Scott refusing to sign the apology is the reason he
was fired. How is that irrelevant?

~~~
bennyg
_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
My gut says that it would have been signed by both.

~~~
adnrw
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.

------
_djo_
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.

------
smackfu
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.

------
Mordor
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.

------
chj
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.

------
pilsetnieks
> 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.

------
pootch
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.

