Apple (AAPL) today announced the departure of Scott Forstall, the company’s senior vice president of its mobile operating system, iOS. The departure was abrupt, but perhaps not entirely unexpected. Forstall had been a longtime and talented member of Apple’s executive team, but as Bloomberg Businessweek reported in a cover story last year, he was also a polarizing figure within the company. He was not without internal rivals and enemies: As we said in our 2011 article, Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design chief, and Bob Mansfield, the company’s head of technology, would rarely take meetings with him unless the Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, was also present.
Forstall is a talented, able performer at various who brought a tremendous amount of energy to many product rollouts at Apple. Which is why his absence from the recent iPad Mini announcement raised some eyebrows. At any major release of a new iOS device, Forstall would have been expected to speak to journalists who gathered in San Jose last week.
Overseeing iOS put Forstall in a tremendous position of power, as Apple’s mobile operating system has increasingly been where the action is in new Apple products and services, but his tenure had plenty of speed bumps. The company’s rollout of iCloud has been better than the previous attempts with Mobile Me and .Mac—iCloud has generated complaints about how hard it is to configure. Forstall was an early supporter of Apple’s purchase of Siri, which led to the voice-activated assistant of the same name—Siri’s been criticized for reliability issues. Add to that the recent Maps issue, in which CEO Cook had to release an apology to Apple customers. It’s quite possible that Forstall, for all his agreed-upon talent and dedication to the company, had little to defend himself with when an reorganization was proposed and he had few friends in the executive suite in Cupertino.
Being demanding or prickly is fine when you’re doing everything right (or, in Steve Jobs’s case, when it’s your company). But if things start to go south on you, it can leave you awfully exposed, with few people leaping to your defense or aid (ask A-Rod). Maybe nice guys finish last, but at least they finish.
