Apples new Chief Design Officer

I could not find the official news on the Apple Inc. website, I had however noticed that Sir Jony Ive had been promoted to Chief Design Officer at the company. If you have been watching the company over the years, you will know exactly who Jony is. According to Wikipedia, Steve Jobs said that Jony was his spiritual partner at the company. They designed many of the products together. Ive has been at the company since 1992, 23 years of being involved with all of the products at the business, having an intimate knowledge of all of them, all of their launches and the inner workings. There are apparently only 22 folks at Apple and the core (no pun intended) have been there for the better part of two decades, they must know each other pretty well. Cult of Mac (yes, really) says that this team rarely gets together for photos of the public kind, here they did recently for the announcement of the watch: Here's the first group picture of Apple's new Industrial Design team.

If you read further down the article, it refers to the secretive design studio: "a steel-and-concrete enclave locked behind a very big door and frosted windows on Apple's campus." I managed to find an incredible article by the New Yorker on Jony, it is really long, it is worth the read in your spare time. Or the next seven minutes, do it now and read it: How an industrial designer became Apple's greatest product. As we well know, in 1997 Apple was on its knees. Now it has a market capitalisation of 763 billion Dollars, they basically are kings and queens of the world. Great interactions there between the individuals (we forget that companies are made up of exceptional people), when the going was tough.

The products are still incredible, I am seeing more and more Macs on the "streets", people getting deeper into the Apple ecosystem. I remember once upon a time when a certain smartphone maker Blackberry ruled the world, just the other day on the Vestact closed WhatsApp group I found a WSJ quote from the related story: How the iPhone Crippled BlackBerry, in which Larry Conlee, then CEO and Mr. Lazaridis's right hand man, say the following about the iPhone: "It wasn't secure. It had rapid battery drain and a lousy [digital] keyboard." The WSJ article is actually a part of the book titled "The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry."

Perhaps Conlee was right about all of those things, the one thing that you can never doubt is that the consumer is always right. Does this Apple appointment suggest Jony Ive will be less involved, I think not, it is just the company rewarding an exceptional engineer and one of the most important folks at the company. Of course the risks are new products, individuals leaving, the truth however is that the legacy of people like Steve Jobs, incredible individuals (if not prickly characters) attract young up and coming engineers, designers, coders to a company. It is worth noting that in a world of brutal hardware and software evolution that you ALWAYS pay attention.