Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman published today the latest edition of your Power On newsletterrecapping the last ten years of Apple’s corporate structure in which the influence of the design team diminished at executive levels in the Cook era, driven by the departure of Jony Ive and the departure of talent as finance and operations had an increasing say over the direction of the product.
However, Gurman believes that incoming CEO John Ternus may be on the verge of reestablishing that relationship and reaffirming the importance of the design group to the company’s future.
After I left the company, oversight of the design team fell to former COO Jeff Williams. This was already a major change from the previous regime in which Ive’s industrial design group dictated the company’s product roadmap from the top down.
This arrangement was highlighted in Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography of Steve Jobs. Jobs is quoted as saying that I have more operating power than anyone at Apple other than himself, because of “the way I set it up.”
Fast forward to today and that couldn’t be further from the current situation, where many believe the company has demoted design to less importance than its operations division. Apple doesn’t even have a senior design role right now, and recently added profiles of Molly Anderson and Steve Lemay to the leadership page.
Incoming CEO John Ternus, who will presumably be more involved in the overall product than Cook, is apparently looking to restore some of the design team’s authority. Gurman says Ternus has already spent a considerable amount of his time with the industrial design group, as he prepares for his succession that will begin on September 1.
Gurman quotes Ternus as saying that “the best-designed object most customers own is an Apple product.” “We will make sure it stays that way.”
You can read the full profile on Bloomberg. Externally, Apple PR is presenting Ternus as the face of recent design successes like the MacBook Neo, and Ternus’ first big public role when he takes over will be to unveil the new foldable iPhone at a media event in the fall.
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