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Some former associates of Forstall, none of whom would comment on the record for fear of alienating Apple, say he routinely takes credit for collaborative successes, deflects blame for mistakes, and is maddeningly political. They say he has such a fraught relationship with other members of the executive team—including lead designer Jony Ive and Mac hardware chief Bob Mansfield—that they avoid meetings with him unless Tim Cook is present.
Office politics are nothing unusual in Corporate America, nor are ambitious and divisive managers. Even if Forstall is controversial, he may just be what Apple needs now that Jobs is gone—a detail-oriented obsessive who gets things done, egos be damned. “I once referred to Scott as Apple’s chief a–hole,” says former Apple software engineer Mike Lee, who left the company in 2010. “And I didn’t mean it as a criticism. I meant it as a compliment. You could say the same thing about Steve Jobs.”
Yet part of what’s made Apple such a spectacular success has been the ability of its management team to drive toward a common goal. Whatever the internal debates, the company has been a disciplined, almost monolithic agent of innovation whose executives fell in line with their leader.
Apple now confronts a whole set of new challenges if it is to continue its epic success into the post-Jobs era. Without its Decider-in-Chief, the company must fundamentally change the way it works. At weekly Monday meetings, Apple executives disagreed about matters all the time, but could count on Jobs to make the final call. Its board of directors must find a new chairman and take a more assertive role guiding the company. And Cook must ensure there isn’t an exodus of those in the company’s top ranks, all of whom are extravagantly wealthy and were loyal to Jobs.
The controversial and ambitious Forstall may present the greatest management puzzle. In families that lose a beloved parent, the children either band together with a shared sense of history and mission—or tear each other apart over the spoils of the estate. Apple’s executives “have to learn new roles, but if somebody among them rises up and lords over the others, they can be resented for being presumptuous, [of trying to] assume Steve Jobs’s legacy,” says Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean of the Yale University School of Management. “But if they treat it as a shared legacy, there is a way to keep that spirit alive.”
Forstall’s most recent triumphs are likely bittersweet. Over the last few years he watched as his biggest champion and mentor slowly lost an agonizing personal battle, all while products running his software have helped make Apple the most valuable company in the world. Apple has sold more than a quarter billion devices running Forstall’s iOS. The iPhone alone, since its 2007 debut, has generated more than $70 billion in sales, inspiring a wave of copycat touchscreen phones from Samsung Electronics, HTC, Hewlett-Packard, and Research In Motion, among others. The iPhone 4S, which goes on sale on Oct. 14, sports a speedy Apple-designed A5 processor and a beefed-up digital camera. And it operates on both major types of cell networks. On Oct. 10, Apple announced that more than one million orders for the new iPhone 4S were placed in a single day, a new iPhone record.
The most significant changes in the device are in Forstall’s upgraded operating system, iOS 5. The new digital assistant, Siri, listens to voice requests for things like driving directions and calendar appointments. This virtual helper completes these tasks, and reports back in a robotic female voice. The iPhone 4S also makes it easier for users to post on Twitter. “They’re shifting the focus from hardware to software and services,” says Gene Munster, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray, who predicts Apple will sell 183 million iOS devices in 2012.
