
So long...
...and thanks for all the cats.
Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Mac software engineering and the man who played a lead role in the development of Mac OS X, is leaving the company. Serlet worked with Steve Jobs at NeXT Computer, and he spent four years at the famed Xerox PARC research laboratory in Silicon Valley. “I’ve worked with Steve for …
There was talk a while back that Jon Ives (he of iDesign fame) would be leaving too. Impressive though St. Jobs is, he can't do it all himself. If too many of the important people leave then that might mean Apple have a serious recruitement problem. The share markets get all worried about Jobs' health, but really it's the other people in the company that matter most.
I don't think that anything about internal Apple politics can be reliably inferred from news such as this. People do move on all the time - fact of life. Sooner or later we all get itchy feet and want a change, and there's nothing special about the fruit themed toy factory that says otherwise.
Merely conjecture, no doubt. Who knows, really, apart from your man....
But consider : "...at this point, I want to focus less on products and more on science,"
But it matters little. I am not buying *any* more Apple (or Sony) products. One has to take a stand sometime. And I am no ignorant Apple detractor, I'll have you know. This is actually being typed on one of my macs.
Let's be honest, there's more science on a Friday afternoon in a key stage 2 classroom than in any proprietary software company. The very definition of peer review is the preserve of open source; which I believe Apple aren't so hot on. No peer review, no openness, no transparency, no science. QED
"but at this point, I want to focus less on products and more on science,”"
Seems clear that he wants to leave Apple exactly to research more academic endeavours. So I don't get the point of your comment, is it just a badly constructed dig at Apple?
Btw Apple does do open source: the core OS (which feeds back to FreeBSD), the widely used Webkit, and others. See http://www.opensource.apple.com/
I suppose the development of the transistor, integrated circuit, the ongoing research into semiconductor physics, and speech recognition to name a few had no scientific basis because largely they were carried out by companies such as Bell Telephone, TI, and BBN? Good to know that the vast majority of readers on the reg have no grounding in science because of our employers' decisions about licensing issues.
And, even though I don't personally think that broad publication is a requirement for applying the scientific method, many discoveries made at private corporations are published both in academic journals and patent filings. In fact, I suspect there are far more publications coming from companies that are predominantly closed than open source shops, largely because such companies are bigger and can afford more research staff.