I was brushing up on my Apple certs (ACTC) about 5 years ago when I saw Sal do an automation session at Apple Connect. He dazzled a room packed full of 150 pretty cynical techs essentially showcasing what Siri on the Mac might look like someday (shortly after it launched on iOS). Out of a cast of about 30 senior presenters that worked and developed for Apple he just plain stole the show. He was inspiring. He was awesome...
.....
Are you f_cking kidding me, Apple?
Does a awesome demo guy make for a great product manager? He was being paid probably a very high salary for managing products, not giving demos. He could be outstanding at the latter, but if that was not his primary job...... there is a disconnect.
Should Apple have found him an educational, research demo job? Perhaps they could with a different structure. But it looking like that he got "parked" in a Product Managers job for some reason that just got skipped over while budgets were constantly growing.
Alot of this stuff doesn't make sense. Unix CLI , javascript are two fundamentally different things. The Unix shells are more of a porting issue than a classic product development track. javascript decoupled from the browser is kind of goofy. Coupling those because AppleScript has "script" in it name is not particularly useful or productive at all. I suspect there was talk of doing synergies there but a full blown product manager? Not particularly necessary, nor did super deep synergies appear over time.
I would suspect that the bulk of Unix shell and Javascript folks never really reported to him. Or if they did it was a constant drama issue for the Product managers who should have had those folks report to them. These two are only extremely superficially related.
The growing "share" / "plug in" mechanism between apps is probably a more natural place for Apple Events and Applescript to go. In short, there are probably other product managers where this stuff is a more natural fit. I wouldn't be surprised if this was actually where the coders were already organizationally assigned. It wouldn't be surprising if his slot was almost all "chief" with little to no "indians" doing day-to-day tactical stuff below him. That this was more if an idea cross-pollination position. After 10=12 years either the that seeding should have took or it didn't.
That said this does sound like lumbering HR and corporate politics. He a person with a mismatch skill set to position and instead of finding a better fit inside the company just eliminate the slot and hand out super large severance packages.
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Yes, but nearly all of it is in overseas banks. Apple pays most of its bills in the US in US dollars. Tim has taken Apple $79B into debt in order to issue USD dividends on the stock.
They started doing it offshore too. Australia and Taiwan
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...ussie-bond-market-with-two-part-bond-offering
Part of the ducking taxes everywhere scheme that is aimed at banker and lawyer employment more than technology employment ...
There is no plan to pay this debt down. It goes up every year. Tim is banking on paying the interest out of future profits. The risk is that once interest rates start rising, rolling over all that debt suddenly gets a lot more expensive, and servicing the interest starts to eat up a real chunk of change.
They should have a some plan. At least not to take anymore on. If Apples revenues go down the dividends should go down too. When start decoupling executive payouts and dividends from corporate results then there is major problem. That is the kind of crap that tanks companies long term. When the execs and investors are managing their own stock portfolio as opposed to managing the company, then the company tends to get thrown under the bus.
Tim has made some risky gambles that SJ was flatly opposed to. That's why debt and dividends and buybacks and all the rest didn't begin until they put SJ in the ground.
SJ didn't have Ichan and some of these greenmail vultures knocking on the door either. All that mountain of cash that SJ piled up drew too much attention. Now Apple has stockholders who basically just want to loot the cash more than care about the company. There is such a thing as having too much cash and too high margins if looking to do something for the long term.
Those gambles have worked out so far, but they rely on things always being as good as they are today. Apple's business just shrank 8% year over year, and there's not much reason to believe it couldn't happen again in 2017.
Zero to $79B debt in 6 years is alot. As long as Apple holds their 30% margins and holds an order of magnitude more in cash it isn't all that risk. Apple can pay all of that off. They'd just have to pay taxes to do it. It would be expense but it isn't particularly high risk (because can cover it. just don't want to. )
Getting rid of good people throughout engineering is no recipe for future product success.
Making an actual car never did make any sense. There is some "off in the weeds" stuff that Apple is doing that doesn't make sense.
Silicon Valley has general tendency to dump the older folks for younger folks mentality. Remember that Apple had a salary suppression agreement going with Google and others for a while that is also now off the table. The bottom half of the pyramid wanting more money is going to impact the top half ( or at least the buffer between the C-level execs and that bottom half. )
