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Comment by georgespencer | Hacker News Reader

A few points of interest here which Venture Beat have skipped:

1. Keller's company, PA, was bought by Apple mainly for its engineering talent. Getting Keller was a huge deal for Apple.

2. Keller has been hired away by Mark Papermaster, who was a disaster at Apple (all of Bob Mansfield's reservations about him from the internal email discussed in IBM v. Papermaster came true: cultural, pace of development, etc.).

I would anticipate an outside hire from Apple to fill his shoes in the next 6-9 months.

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Why was Papermaster a disaster at Apple? I've never really heard why. The only thing I've ever heard was that Jobs lost confidence him in, and it was during antennaegate, but it was never clear if he played any role in it.

Whether or not it was his fault, Jobs blamed Papermaster for antennagate [1]. Papermaster was also there during the white iPhone shipping delay which may have played a factor.

[1] http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/08/07/papermaster

"The Difference Between the Janitor and the Vice President."
Jobs tells the VP that if the garbage in his office is not being emptied regularly for some reason, he would ask the janitor what the problem is. The janitor could reasonably respond by saying, "Well, the lock on the door was changed, and I couldn't get a key."
It's an irritation for Jobs, but it's an understandable excuse for why the janitor couldn't do his job. As a janitor, he's allowed to have excuses.
"When you're the janitor, reasons matter," Jobs tells newly minted VPs, according to Lashinsky.

"Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering," says Jobs, adding, that Rubicon is "crossed when you become a VP."

http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-the-difference-...

I would be interested to hear if Jobs blamed himself for anything.

He blamed himself for hiring John Sculley:

"When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don't matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when [John] Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when [Steve] Ballmer took over at Microsoft."

Four factors.

1. iPod Touch + Camera. Apple starting doing big production runs on this and it fucked up, big time. There was a problem with the cameras and the devices were unusable. There was an entire generation of iPod Touch which, as a result, shipped with the necessary connectors for a camera, but without the physical camera or the casing for a camera. As far as I know, this and the antenna were the main reasons.

2. White iPhone was hugely embarrassing.

3. iPhone antenna. Jobs handled it really well: common problem, nobody's perfect. That's not Apple though. Papermaster's team squarely blamed him for this.

4. Bob Mansfield and others identified problems with the cultural fit before he joined, which seemed to be true. He wasn't lazy or dumb, he just wasn't proactive and smart in the way Apple VPs are.

As befits the hype surrounding fruit based cult of personality, too much focus on individuals in these reports. Without wanting to diminish his achievements you need more than a couple of guru VP's to building best in class SoC's on schedule. Of course, it goes without saying (or even trawling linkedin) that Apple has built up such a team from a range of sources for an impressive pipeline of future products :-)

Yeah, but Guru VPs can help attract and retain those other people.

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/gerard-williams-iii/a/95a/278

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