What do you do after your product gets leaked to the media months before it’s ready, and after it launches, you realize it’s the buggiest iPhone ever and in a desperate move, you post bogus videos of competing phones?
Well… you just hope your boss is not Steve Jobs!
Joke aside, this is exactly what happened to Mark Papermaster, who joined Apple less than 20 months ago and “resigned” over the weekend from his position as Senior Vice President of Devices Hardware Engineering, a.k.a. iPhone 4 Hardware Chief.
All this after a long struggle by Apple to get Papermaster from the clutches of IBM where he had given a good 25 years.
The spot will be now taken over by Bob Mansfield, the Senior VP of the Mac hardware team. Mansfield was also actively involved with the architecture of the iPhone 4, which makes him, for Jobs, the best choice to replace Papermaster.
Hey Steve! Now that you’ve fired the half-culprit of the iPhone 4 fiasco (the other one is you, remember?), don’t you think it’s time to replace the cute iBrick 4 and give us something we can actually use? Just a thought.
Jean-Baptiste Su is the technology columnist for L’Expansion, the leading business publication in France. He’s also the co-founder and editor of TechPulse 360, a blog at the crossroads of business and technology, exploring the innovation and companies defining the high-tech and clean-tech industries.
Jean-Baptiste started his journalistic career 18 years ago at IDG in France, first as reporter at InfoPC (PC World) and then senior editor at Le Monde Informatique (ComputerWorld). He later joined Decision Informatique, part of Groupe Tests (01 Informatique, 01net.com…) as senior editor, before heading to France’s financial daily newspaper La Tribune as its local Silicon Valley correspondent.
