Edible Apple

Randsinrepose writes about the departure of Scott Forstall and how it may signal the beginning of the demise for Apple. Whether or you agree or not, it’s certainly an interesting point worth pondering.

Forstall, however, was old school. In my years at Apple, the Caffe Macs chatter about Forstall was that he was the only legit successor to Jobs because he displayed a variety of Jobsian characteristics. Namely:

• He was an asshole, but…
• Success seemed to surround him, and…
• No one was quite sure about the secret recipe to achieve this success.

While I’d continued to hear about the disdain amongst the executive ranks about Forstall after I left Apple, I was still shocked about his departure, because while he was in no way Steve Jobs, he was the best approximation of Steve Jobs that Apple had left. You came to expect a certain amount of disruption around him because that’s how business was done at Apple – it was well-managed internal warfare. Innovation is not born out out of a committee; innovation is a fight. It’s messy, people die, but when the battle is over, something unimaginably significant has been achieved.