The senior VP's chief weakness, writes Fortune's Adam Lashinsky, is his naked ambition
Jobs and Forstall. Source: AppLecture.com
He's young (43). Comfortable on stage (played Sweeney Todd in high school). Has serious nerd credentials (Stanford, NeXT). Shares Steve Jobs' obsession with detail (keeps a jeweler's loupe in his office to check every pixel on every icon). And the division he heads -- mobile software -- drives nearly 70% of Apple's (AAPL) income.
"He's a sharp, down-to-earth, and talented engineer, and a more-than-decent presenter," one entrepreneur told Adam Lashinsky. "He's the total package."
According to Lashinsky's new book Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired -- and Secretive -- Company Really Works, senior vice president Scott Forstall stands out among the rest of Apple's executive team as the most likely to succeed Steve Jobs once the Tim Cook era is over.
If ...
"If there's a knock on Forstall," writes Lashinsky, "it's that he wears his ambition in plainer view than the typical Apple executive. He blatantly accumulated influence in recent years, including, it is whispered, when Jobs was on medical leave."
Photo: Apple Inc.
Lashinsky's profile of Forstall is likely to be closely read inside and outside the company. Scheduled to be released next week, Inside Apple is the most important Apple book since Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs. It is, in many ways, the perfect companion to the Jobs biography. If Isaacson's was the Time Magazine or People Weekly version of the Apple story, what Lashinsky delivers -- appropriately enough, given the magazine he works for -- is the Fortune version.
Lashinsky's goal was to understand the company Jobs built as a business. But unlike, Isaacson, Lashinsky didn't have Jobs' cooperation. Nor did the company make any Apple executives or employees available. So like a correspondent debriefing refugees at the border of a war zone, Lashinsky interviewed scores of collaborators, competitors and former employees after they left the confines of Apple's closely guarded Cupertino campus.
The result is a deep dive into an extraordinary enterprise that has disrupted one industry after another while ignoring -- if not deliberately breaking -- most of the rules of modern business management.
Jobs, of course, looms large in Lashinsky's narrative, as do CEO Tim Cook and design chief Jony Ive. But it's Forstall who best fits Jobs' mold and seems most likely to eventually succeed him.
"Whether Forstall will happily remain a supporting player," Lashinsky writes, "will be one of the great internal dramas of Cook's tenure."
He mapped out a strategy to rescue the failing merger on a whiteboard in 2003
Jobs reviewing an early version of OS X. Photo: Brent Schlender
After a long meeting with Steve Jobs last year about what the iPad would mean for publishers, Fortune's technology editor Stephanie Mehta -- known to her colleagues as "Stephanie Telephony" when she covered telecommunications -- remarked that Jobs was a surprisingly astute student of other people's MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Oct 25, 2011 7:05 AM ET
Gates looming over Jobs at Macworld 1997
Among the highlights of the excerpt from Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs in the current issue of Fortune is the story of how Jobs repaired Apple's (AAPL) relationship with Microsoft (MSFT) just in time to get Bill Gates to participate in his 1997 MacWorld keynote. Jobs waited until the end to introduce, after a dramatic pause, Apple's new partner and investor. Suddenly Gates' face appeared, to boos and MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Oct 24, 2011 12:40 PM ET
Fortune's Kindle book is a treasure trove of vintage Steve Jobs vignettes
Aug. 5, 1995. Source: Time Inc.
"Contempt" is probably the word that best describes Steve Jobs' attitude toward the press. But he courts the publications he cares about, and over the years one of the magazines he courted most assiduously -- at least until a certain 2008 cover story -- was Fortune.
While at Apple (AAPL), NeXT, Pixar and Apple again, MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Sep 28, 2011 6:45 AM ET
What would the startup scene be like without the blog that currently animates it? A whole lot better, actually.
FORTUNE -- At TechCrunch's Disrupt conference earlier this year, Michael Arrington brought Arianna Huffington on stage and the two played "The Odd Couple" for 10 minutes. "How the hell did we both end up at AOL?" Arrington asked, musing on AOL's purchase of TechCrunch for a reported $25 million and The Huffington MORE
Chadwick Matlin - Sep 7, 2011 2:17 PM ET
How would you describe Steve Jobs in a sentence or two?
It's not as easy as you might think. In the 1:30 video below (and here), editors at Fortune and CNNMoney try to capture Apple's (AAPL) former CEO in 20 words or less.
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Aug 27, 2011 7:16 AM ET
Fortune's curated selection of the day's most newsworthy tech stories from all over the Web. Sign up to get the newsletter delivered to you every day.
"Steve built a company and culture that is unlike any other in the world and we are going to stay true to that -- it is in our DNA. We are going to continue to make the best products in the world that delight MORE
JP Mangalindan, Writer-Reporter - Aug 26, 2011 3:30 AM ET
Six minutes on Jobs' legacy at Apple. A two-minute spotlight on Cook, the new CEO.
Source: CNNMoney
The video team at CNNMoney has produced two pieces to mark the changing of the guard at Apple (AAPL).
To reflect on Steve Jobs' legacy, I was invited to join a team from Fortune magazine that includes managing editor Andy Serwer, tech editor Stephanie Mehta, senior editor at large Adam Lashinsky and contributor Michael Copeland.
The MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Aug 25, 2011 6:17 AM ET
Moves up from 59th place in 2010 based on boffo sales growth and return on investment
Source: Barron's
In what Barron's describes as "a tip of the hat" to the corporations that generated the most revenue growth and cash returns in recent years, the magazine moved Apple (AAPL) up 55 spots in its 13th annual ranking of America's 500 largest companies that aren't currently in bankruptcy.
"While such operating success might not MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - May 7, 2011 12:31 PM ET
Adam Lashinsky's "Inside" story in the new issue of Fortune is packed with juicy revelations
SVPs: Phil Schiller clowning for Jony Ive, Eddy Cue and Scott Forstall on the Apple campus in 2010. Photo: Robyn Twomey
After the simultaneous, and more-or-less disastrous, launch of the iPhone 3G and MobileMe in the summer of 2008 -- the launch one Gizmodo reader dubbed "iPocalypse" -- Steve Jobs summoned the MobileMe team to the MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - May 7, 2011 9:30 AM ETEvery morning, discover the companies, deals and trends in tech that are moving markets and making headlines. SUBSCRIBE
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