Biography claims Scott Forstall wants Apple top job

iOS chief eying-up Tim Cook's CEO position?Apple News By Chris Smith Tuesday at 18:24 UTC | Tell us what you think [ 0 comments ]

Tweet Scott Forstall has his eyes on the top job according to new Apple bio

A new biography hints at a potential power struggle in the post-Steve Jobs era at Apple by claiming iOS boss Scott Forstall has his eyes on the top job.

The Inside Apple book, by Adam Lashinsky says that the ambitious VP of iPhone software has "blatantly accumulated influence" at the company.

Lashinsky's unofficial biography, which is released next week, claims that Forstall could be a CEO-in-waiting despite Tim Cook's recent appointment.

Ambition in plainer view

"He's a sharp, down-to-earth, and talented engineer, and a more-than-decent presenter," writes Lashinsky. "He's the total package.

"If there's a knock on Forstall, it's that he wears his ambition in plainer view than the typical Apple executive.

"He blatantly accumulated influence in recent years, including, it is whispered, when Jobs was on medical leave."

"Whether Forstall will happily remain a supporting player will be one of the great internal dramas of Cook's tenure."

Companion

Lashinsky's book, How America's Most Admired - And Secretive - Company Really Works is seen as perfect companion to the recent Steve Jobs biograhpy, written by Walter Isaacson.

The Fortune Magazine writer interviewed Apple employees, collaborators and rivals as they left the company's heavily-guarded Cupertino complex.

Via: Forbes

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Gary Marshall: Amazon wants to watch your web browsing

Amazon's very proud of its new Silk web browser, which brings Amazon's mighty backend to the job of speeding up web browsing - so proud, in fact, that it seems the firm plans to bring it to other people's devices too. Is it a Trojan horse?

I don't mean that it's going to give your bank details to Jeff Bezos, because let's face it, he's already got those. I mean a Trojan horse in that it's going to have access to every Kindle Fire's entire web usage, enabling it to build the kind of data picture that makes Phorm, Google search history or Facebook's Beacon look like very small potatoes indeed.

Here's how it works: part of the browser lives in the cloud, and when you click a link or enter a URL Amazon will "take into account things like network conditions, page complexity and the location of any cached content." That's good for you, because it could speed up your browsing, and it's good for Amazon, because Amazon gets to store details of every single thing you do online.

Maybe Jeff Bezos forgot to mention that bit.

Why worry?

As Apple employee number 8, Chris Espinosa has forgotten more about tech than most of us will ever know - so if he's worried about Silk, we should be too. As he writes on his Posterous blog, "people who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon's opportunity here."

According to Espinosa, "Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping and what prices they're being offered there... in essence the Fire user base is Amazon's Mechanical Turk, scraping the web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behaviour in existence."

The security bods at Sophos aren't impressed either: they've been poring through the Silk privacy policy and they don't like what they see. The T&Cs note that "URLs, IP addresses and MAC addresses will be logged and can be retained for 30 days", and the FAQ appears to suggest that your secure HTTP traffic will be intercepted too. There is an off-cloud mode, but you can bet that won't be particularly prominent.

Never mind "people who bought this book also bought": what Amazon's working on here is a "people with your symptoms also bought", "people with your perilous financial history also bought", "people with your balloon fetish also bought" engine. It's not storing your individual data, but as Don Park comments on Espinosa's post, "they don't have to know who you are, just what you are". If the data wasn't valuable, Amazon wouldn't be trying to get it.

I can't help thinking that Amazon, and Facebook, and Google, and all the other big players are giving us the privacy equivalent of boiling a frog, the (mythical, apparently) technique of slowly increasing the heat so that the frog doesn't realise it's being cooked until it's far too late. Last week Facebook had its hand on the gas; this week, it's Amazon. Who's next?

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Week in Tech: HP says it didn't say it wants to quit PCs

"Is it me, or is the tech industry trying to cram all of this year's news into a single week?" our columnist Gary Marshall asked last Friday.

It certainly seems that way: on Wednesday Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple, and a few days previously the world's biggest PC maker decided to stop phones and tablets and sell off its PC division.

So what on Earth is going on? Apple first. We've been expecting it for a while, but Steve Jobs' resignation still came as a surprise:

Tim Cook takes over - the man that has effectively been running Apple for ages anyway. Does the following description remind you of anyone? "He wears blue jeans and trainers. He's a workaholic.He's incredibly intelligent, doesn't miss a detail, and can destroy you with a single question. He's had a brush with mortality. He's intensely private. He eats, sleeps and breathes Apple." It sounds like Steve Jobs, but we're describing Tim Cook.

"With Cook running the ship and Jonathan Ive taking care of design, Steve Jobs is leaving Apple in very capable hands."

Despite Cook's competence, Jobs' departure is the end of an era, Marshall writes: the industry Jobs helped create has grown up, and grown dull. It's "a place for patent lawyers, not product visionaries - a place for Olly Murs, not Exile on Main Street."

Goodbye to the TouchPad

Jobs isn't the only one getting out of the computer business. HP is too. The world's biggest PC manufacturer has canned its tablet and smartphone divisions, with the price of the HP TouchPad plummeting to £89. Inevitably there was a rush and stocks sold out almost instantly; HP promises that there's more coming.

The end of the TouchPad and Palm smartphones means that WebOS, HP's own and rather attractive operating system, is dead. "WebOS is not dead," says HP vice-president Stephen Dewitt. "It's just having a nap. A very, very long nap." Okay, we made that last bit up.

But its long-term future doesn't look good. "The whole world isn't just about tablets and phones," Dewitt said. "There are going to be appliances of so many different sizes and shapes in the future that are going to require a human interface for data". So there you go. WebOS may be coming to a fridge near you. That's much more exciting than tablets, isn't it?

HP moves to quit PCs

Not only is HP getting shot of its mobile devices, but it intends to get rid of its PC business too. Why? Allow us to explain: "PCs aren't going away, but the business of making them has changed dramatically... HP wasn't losing money on PCs, but it wasn't making enough money."

It's particularly tough at the moment, "when stockbrokers are hurling themselves from high buildings and most people have stopped spending money on luxuries." HP, like IBM before it, has decided to focus on selling services to businesses, not making computers with single-digit profit margins.

However, HP yesterday moved to quash a lot of speculation over the move, saying it hadn't actually said it was getting out of the PC business. Which it actually did say.

"Let me be absolutely clear in saying that at no stage has HP said it is quitting the PC business," explained CEO Leo Apotheker in a bizarre statement. "Three options are being investigated, and whether the company is spun off, sold or kept in the HP portfolio, the team in the UK remains committed to creating and supporting great products and services."

So despite saying it won't be getting out of the PC business, it still wants to get out of the PC business.

Where is this all heading? Marshall reckons that "the PC isn't dead, but our relationship with it is changing: it's gone from white-hot tech to something more akin to white goods. When was the last time you got excited about a washing machine, or a kettle? That's where the PC's heading."

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Apple wants Tim Cook for at least 10 years

New Apple CEO Tim Cook must remain with the company for the next ten years if he is to pick up the bumper pile of shares awarded with his new title.

Apple has made a whopping one million shares available to Steve Jobs' replacement, dependent on his continued tenure with the company until 2021.

At today's prices, a million stock units equates to somewhere in the region of £250m. Not a bad chunk of change.

Half of those shares will mature in 2016, while the other half a million will be restricted until the end of the ten year period.

Snowballed

"In connection with Mr. Cook's appointment as Chief Executive Officer, the Board awarded Mr. Cook 1,000,000 restricted stock units," Apple told the US Securities and Exchange commission.

When you consider how Apple stock has snowballed massively over the last few years (over 6,000 per cent since Steve Jobs returned to the company in 1997), Cook's tenure at Apple is likely to make him a billionaire.

New Chairman of the Board Steve Jobs currently owns 5.5 million shares, which would be worth over $2bn if he decided to cash them in and buy a desert island to retire to.

Link: TechLand

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