“Everything we do at Apple is aimed at making our products the best in the world. We know that you expect that from us, and we will keep working non-stop until Maps lives up to the same incredibly high standard.” -- Tim Cook 
 
 Disaster recovery is on everyone’s minds this week as Hurricane Sandy spends itself upon the US East Coast -- seems it was on Apple's [AAPL] mind too as CEO Tim Cook engaged in a management reshuffle designed, presumably, to sharpen the company’s focus on products not politics as it puts its best design mind in charge of the future evolution of the user interface. 
 
 [ABOVE: Forstall out as Apple CEO takes control.] 
 
 Apple is a software company 
 
 Apple is a software company. It’s hardware may be good, but it is the software that defines the user experience. 
 
 At best Apple is all about focus: focus on the customer; focus on the products; focus on the company. Traditionally it operates in a series of silos, independent self-regulating units concentrating on one aspect of a software or hardware system, not necessarily in full knowledge of the final outcome. 
 
 This is the kind of volatile yet mission critical environment that needs team players, not mandarins. I suspect that’s why Cook’s tossed Apple’s powerful iOS chief, Scott Forstall, out the frying pan, reportedly because Jobs’ golden child was too proud to sign the company’s apology over the Maps affair. 
 
 Apple may be working away at its pride problem, after all. 
 
 In a sense, Forstall couldn’t sign the document. He was responsible for Apple’s Maps, and in his presentation of the system he seemed to insist it to be the best in the world, which it wasn’t. 
 
 That’s not to say Maps is all bad -- technically its pretty good. Turn-by-turn driving instructions are impressive, and the software’s choice of vector graphics make it smooth to use. 
 
 What the technically-minded Forstall neglected to ensure was that the system was populated with enough geographical data to be useful. He also failed to warn Apple users or (presumably) the executive team that the software wasn’t quite ready. 
 
 Signing Cook’s apology would have been an admission of error, which Forstall would inevitably have felt unable to do, as it would cast doubt on his credibility when delivering future iOS projects. He’d called Maps “fantastic”, after all. 
 
 Focus on products, not politics 
 
 This might have been acceptable while Jobs, who championed Forstall, was still around, but given rumors that the iOS chief was a political animal it’s unlikely he had enough support left from those he had been competing with to ask for their support. For example, designer Jony Ive reputedly refused to sit in meetings with Forstall unless Tim Cook was around to mediate. 
 
 The Wall Street Journal notes: 
 
 “Mr. Forstall's departure came after mounting tension with members of Apple's executive ranks. For years, senior executives had complained that he wasn't cooperative and showed off his close relationship with Apple's late co-founder Steve Jobs. Without Mr. Jobs to mediate, tensions between Mr. Forstall and other executives built, according to the people familiar with the matter. The 43-year-old Mr. Forstall recently told people that there is no "decider" now that Mr. Jobs is gone, according to a person briefed on the conversation. Mr. Forstall also recently sent some members of Apple's iOS software team an email saying he felt the group wasn't working on enough big ideas in mobile software, according to a person briefed on the email.” 
 
 Forstall’s clearly been acting up, and has found his success to be far from rubber-clad. For all these reasons, he got canned. Not that Apple puts it as overtly as that, saying just, “Apple also announced that Scott Forstall will be leaving Apple next year and will serve as an advisor to CEO Tim Cook in the interim.” 
 
 User experiences on steroids 
 
 What’s interesting is that Jony Ive will be taking over responsibility for Human Interfaces across the company while Craig Federighi will lead both the OS X and iOS teams. 
 
 (I’ve also heard one rumor this morning claiming Bertrand Serlet may return to the team, a not unlikely outcome given the increasing importance of cloud-based services to Apple’s device future.) 
 
 While the future unity between iOS and OS X could yield fascinating results, I’m more interested in Jony Ive’s move to take control of the user interface on Apple products. 
 
 Ive is one of the two-man team (Steve Jobs, Jony Ive) behind the iMac, a single product which helped resurrect the company in the late ’90’s. The award-winning designer’s deeply connected to the company, and his product designs are all about focus. 
 
 You could argue that giving Ive responsibility for the user experience as well as product design gives him the opportunity to deliver incredibly refined, incredibly simple solutions -- products in which the design and the software interoperate at an incredibly subtle level, sucking users into viscerally pleasing experiences. 
 
 Ive is probably one of the most respected members of the company, and given Forstall’s many years of work to develop loyalty within his team in order to support his growing corporate political muscle, Apple needed to field this business to an executive likely to command the respect of a developer group that might have felt unhappy at the departure of their team leader. 
 
 Future focused 
 
 While it’s likely Apple’s announced changes have been expressed in such a way as to put a positive spin on what is likely to have been one of the biggest moments in the company’s internal politics for a decade, the release also suggests other big moves ahead. 
 
 “Bob Mansfield will lead a new group, Technologies, which combines all of Apple’s wireless teams across the company in one organization, fostering innovation in this area at an even higher level. This organization will also include the semiconductor teams, who have ambitious plans for the future,” the release explains. 
 
 Mansfield announced his retirement from the company earlier this year. He’s now been persuaded back to lead Apple’s mobile mission, which will include development of new “ambitious” semiconductors and very likely also includes development of new product families. 
 
 I continue to believe one sector in which Mansfield, Ive and the increasingly powerful Eddy Cue can stake some claim will be in solutions for the smart home. 
 
 The departure of iPod father Tony Fadell to launch a company dedicated to such products shows the team must at least be pondering such plans. Interesting also is Apple’s decision to begin selling Wi-Fi equipped, iOS-controlled light bulbs in its retail stores -- a good example of the kind of thing you can do with slightly intelligent domestic devices. 
 
 Add a dose of Ive’s minimalist design and the kind of power and security you get with the Unix-based iOS and OS X, and you could see the company transform once again, becoming the consumer electronics powerhouse it has inevitably been transforming itself into. 
 
 There’s been some concerns in recent weeks that Apple has no ideas to follow up the iPad and iPhone: that once these products become mature the company has no hot new product sector by which to boost its future business. 
 
 Seeking alpha 
 
 I don’t believe that’s true for one solitary second. 
 
 Merely because some Wall Street analyst hasn’t got a clue as to what the next technological imperative will be isn’t so surprising -- these people work for banks who’ll lose money blithely while still taking bonuses, and then approach the public they’ve been profiting off for years to get a bail-out when they get it wrong. Bean counters they might be, but innovators they ain’t. 
 
 The new Technology group will be looking across the board at what kind of products Apple can deliver which exploit its existing technologies while opening up new business opportunities for the firm. 
 
 Goods and services for the digital home would seem an inevitable progression for a company which has already prepared a chain of high profile, beautifully-designed retail stores by which to bring its future products to an enthusiastic public. 
 
 Those stores are also products. They exist to entice customers into Apple’s world view. They are profit centers, true, but they are also gateways into the company’s vision of the world. 
 
 That former Dixon’s chief, John Browett, didn’t understand the importance of the retail segment to company identity is possibly why he got fired. He thought he was running a shop when in fact he was presiding over a tangible expression of Apple’s focus on the customer experience. 
 
 The vision 
 
 Apple is among the first firms in the 21st Century to truly understand that a customer’s experience of a product doesn’t start when they get the thing home, it starts when they think of visiting the store to take a look at what they might buy. 
 
 What Cook appears to have done is cut out the people who don’t share the vision he has for the company moving forward. 
 
 He doesn’t want the executive team to collapse from the inside under the weight of political infighting; he’s quite prepared to wait until things are ready to ship, but demands his fellow executives are prepared to tell him if they aren’t. There’s not space for a one-man army in his team. 
 
 This executive reshuffle is an expression of one year’s work by the CEO to identify those who can help the company move forward, to ensure focus isn’t on individual career progression, but on the main mission of the company: 
 
 “Everything we do at Apple is aimed at making our products the best in the world.” 
 
 Through a few executive sacrifices, Apple should now be in position to focus on that mission and dance lightly to where the puck is going, not where it has been. 
 
 Got a story? Drop me a line via Twitter or in comments below and let me know. I'd like it if you chose to follow me on Twitter so I can let you knowwhen these items are published here first on Computerworld. ||||| Apple has just announced that Scott Forstall will be leaving Apple as of early next year, ending his tenure as SVP of iOS Software. As part of the management change, Jony Ive, Bob Mansfield, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi will take on new responsibilities. Forstall will remain on as an advisor to Tim Cook between now and next year, but appears to be departing the SVP role immediately, according to an official Apple press release. 
 
 In addition to Forstall, John Browett will also be leaving Apple. Browett was brought on board as Apple’s head of retail back in January, having served previously as CEO of UK retail chain Dixons. Apple recently reported on its retail progress, having done $4.2 billion of sales through that channel in Q4 2012, beating its Q3 earnings. It’s unclear from the release what exactly was behind Browett’s departure, but it seems like he was likely not a good fit, and his hiring was criticized by a lot of people who didn’t find the Dixons shopping experience particularly compelling. 
 
 While Apple says a search is on for Browett’s replacement, it seems to be spreading out Forstall’s duties among existing executive team members. Jony Ive will add Human Interface leadership to his existing design role, Eddy Cue will take on Siri and the nebulous cloud of Maps in addition to iTunes and App Stores, as well as iCloud, and Craig Federighi will fold iOS into his OS X supervision as Apple “brings together the OS teams.” 
 
 Bob Mansfield, who had previously been on the way out at Apple, will now head a new group called Technologies covering all of Apple’s wireless and semiconductor teams. That’s an interesting new department, and one that could have significant control over Apple’s future given its deepening emphasis on semiconductor design in-house. 
 
 Forstall’s departure is the biggest shakeup by far, however. Forstall joined Apple in 1997, having worked for Jobs at NeXT before that. Many had pegged him as a CEO-in-waiting, both before and after the death of Apple founder Steve Jobs last year. Some on Twitter are suggesting that perhaps Forstall took the brunt of the blame for Apple’s problems with Maps, but it’s also reasonable to hypothesize that with little or no chance of attaining the top spot, Forstall himself wanted to seek out other opportunities where he might take more of a leadership role. 
 
 This is definitely the most significant shift in Apple’s make up since Tim Cook took over the CEO role, and even though Forstall leaving is the flashiest aspect, the redistribution of duties shows a very different approach to the way Apple thinks about its products and product lines internally than what we’ve seen the past. The unification of iOS and OS X under one umbrella is, I think, particularly telling, and might signal increasing unity across Apple’s desktop and mobile software. ||||| According to multiple people who have either seen or have been briefed on the upcoming iOS 7, the operating system sports a redesigned user-interface that will be attractive to new iOS users, but potentially unsettling for those who are long-accustomed to the platform… 
 
 The new interface is said to be “very, very flat,” according to one source. Another person said that the interface loses all signs of gloss, shine, and skeuomorphism seen across current and past versions of iOS. Another source framed the new OS as having a level of “flatness” approaching recent releases of Microsoft’s Windows Phone “Metro” UI. 
 
 “Flat” design is based on simplicity and pushes aside heavy textures and digital metaphors of real-life objects found in skeumorphic interfaces. “Flatness” could also point to a more streamlined interface across the entire system that can stand the test of time. 
 
 For example, younger generations of iOS users may not resonate well with a yellow notepad (as found in the current iOS Notes app) or the leather-bound calendar app. 
 
 iOS has typically been regarded as an easy-to-use, intuitive operating system. The Company even seems to say as much on its iOS webpage (shown directly below). With its large user-base and market attraction, Apple obviously does not want to make any design changes that make the software more difficult to use. 
 
 While the look of the updated system may be surprising to some, iOS 7 is reportedly not more difficult to use than earlier versions of software platform. There is apparently no new learning curve in the same way there was no learning curve when the iPods went color. While iOS 7 does look different, its core apps and system fundamentals (like the Lock and Home screens) mostly operate in a similar fashion to how they do today. 
 
 iOS 7 is codenamed “Innsbruck,” according to three people familiar with the OS. The interface changes include an all-new icon set for Apple’s native apps in addition to newly designed tool bars, tab bars, and other fundamental interface features across the system. iOS devices running the next-generation software reportedly have polarizing filters to decrease viewing angles of on-lookers. 
 
 In addition to losing the complex interface design characteristics from earlier versions of iOS, Apple has been discussing and testing ways to add more ‘glance-able’ information and system options panels, like Notification Center, to the software. While it is still uncertain if Apple will end up including such new functionality in iOS 7, or how the Company will implement the potential addition, one of the early ideas was to implement the new panels via swipes from the left and right side of an iOS device’s display. This would be similar to the gesture on Apple’s Mac trackpads for accessing Notification Center in Mountain Lion, but what, specifically, the iOS gesture could access is uncertain. 
 
 Prior to announcing and launching new versions of iOS, Apple tests many various implementations for features. For example, Apple had toyed with the idea of having an Expose-like Multitasking interface for iOS 4, but ended up choosing the linen-backed bottom drawer that we are now accustomed to. 
 
 Apple’s redesigned iOS experience stems from Apple Senior Vice President of Industrial Design Jony Ive now spearheading interface design. With former Senior Vice President of iOS Scott Forstall leaving Apple late last year, influence on software design was handed over to Ive. Ive is long-known as the king behind Apple’s many hardware successes like the iPad, iPhone, iPod, and Mac computers. 
 
 In an interview early last year, Ive shared his lack of connection to the software that runs on his hardware. 
 
 When I mention the fake stitching, Ive offers a wince but it’s a gesture of sympathy rather than a suggestion that he dislikes such things. At least, that’s how I read it. He refuses to be drawn on the matter, offering a diplomatic reply: “My focus is very much working with the other teams on the product ideas and then developing the hardware and so that’s our focus and that’s our responsibility. In terms of those elements you’re talking about, I’m not really connected to that.” 
 
 Matching the information about iOS 7 gaining a “flatter” interface design, a profile of Apple’s internal software design work paints Ive as against flashy, skeumorphic interfaces: 
 
 Inside Apple, tension has brewed for years over the issue. Apple iOS SVP Scott Forstall is said to push for skeuomorphic design, while industrial designer Jony Ive and other Apple higher-ups are said to oppose the direction. “You could tell who did the product based on how much glitz was in the UI,” says one source intimately familiar with Apple’s design process. 
 
 Apple’s change in interface philosophy under Jony Ive and Tim Cook is also a radical departure from Apple under Steve Jobs. 
 
 Jobs, according to the same profile of Apple’s design work, was, like Forstall, a proponent of life-like interfaces. 
 
 But before Forstall, it was Steve Jobs who encouraged the skeuomorphic approach, some say. “iCal’s leather-stitching was literally based on a texture in his Gulfstream jet,” says the former senior UI designer. “There was lots of internal email among UI designers at Apple saying this was just embarrassing, just terrible.” 
 
 While one of our sources paints the iOS 7 design changes as changes that will gain the appreciation of some and the surprise of others, Apple CEO Tim Cook seems excited and confident about what the company has in store. During the question-and-answer session of the Q1 2013 earnings call, responding to a question regarding Apple’s software updates for 2013, Cook said, “we feel great about what we have got in store.” 
 
 Based on Cook’s past comments and moves to further integrate both Apple’s products and its internal culture, Cook’s choice to put Ive in charge of software design also seems to stem from Cook’s admiration of integrated experiences. In a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek earlier this year, Cook addressed Forstall’s ousting from Apple and Ive’s new work on software design as a way to further unify Apple’s hardware and software: 
 
 Jony [Ive, senior vice president of industrial design], who I think has the best taste of anyone in the world and the best design skills, now has responsibility for the human interface. I mean, look at our products. (Cook reaches for his iPhone.) The face of this is the software, right? And the face of this iPad is the software. So it’s saying, Jony has done a remarkable job leading our hardware design, so let’s also have Jony responsible for the software and the look and feel of the software, not the underlying architecture and so forth, but the look and feel. 
 
 Over the past couple of months, Apple seems to have been hinting at an impending shift in its software design philosophy. 
 
 Earlier this year, Apple released an updated version of its Podcasts app for iPhone and iPad in order to simplify some design elements (comparison shown above). Prior to that recent update, the application included a physical “tape deck” interface for the user to manipulate in order to move through a podcast. 
 
 Additionally, Apple’s WWDC 2013 logo, the art for the conference in which iOS 7 will be announced, has sparked speculation about flat interface design with its modern, lightweight text and other elements. Indeed, one source claims that Apple’s Game Center icon and interface materials will be somewhat akin to the colorful nature of the WWDC 2013 logo. Because of its casino-like, green-felt design, Apple’s current Game Center app has been widely panned by proponents of flat software interface design. 
 
 Also, Apple highlights iPad and iPhone applications on its homepage that include flat-interface designs. For example, the home page touting the full-sized iPad and iPad mini highlights former Apple employee Loren Brichter’s popular Letterpress game. Letterpress has been regarded by many as a simple to use, “easy-on-the-eyes” game for its flat textured interface. 
 
 With Apple’s vibrant iOS application development community, the prospects of a redesigned iOS go beyond Apple’s apps and core interface functions. Internal to the third-party iOS app community, some fear that Apple’s interface changes could deem App Store apps, that are currently built to look consistent with Apple’s own interface, outdated. 
 
 AppHero’s Jordan Satok, who has a comprehensive view of the App Store ecosystem, points out that iOS interface changes will likely not pose challenges for all developers. 
 
 “When we started building iOS apps almost 5 years ago, most apps looked the same. Apple did an amazing job designing UIKit to provide a really consistent user experience across apps,” he said. “As the App Store has grown, and the types of apps being built have evolved, designers and developers have pioneered new interface styles and concepts.” 
 
 Because many apps are picking up unique interface designs, Apple’s changes to its core software will likely not make much of a difference to these developers. Nonetheless, it is likely that once iOS 7 is announced, developers that have followed Apple’s own past iOS design trends will quickly move to enhance their App Store apps to follow some of Apple’s changes. 
 
 Apple’s next version of OS X will include some design changes, but the changes will not be as notable as the aforementioned enhancements to iOS.
– Now we know why Apple canned iOS guru Scott Forstall: He refused to sign a letter apologizing for iOS 6's much-maligned map app, sources tell the Wall Street Journal—a letter that CEO Tim Cook wound up signing himself. Forstall was close with Steve Jobs, and indeed was once considered a potential successor, but he had a contentious relationship with other Apple executives. Forstall had recently been heard complaining that Apple had no "decider" without Jobs. Chief designer Jonathan Ive reportedly refused to sit in on meetings with Forstall unless Cook was there to referee, according to ComputerWorld. Ive, interestingly enough, will be taking over Forstall's responsibilities—which, Harry McCracken at Time writes, could make him "the most important person at Apple." Yesterday's other departure, retail chief John Browett, was asked to leave as well, sources say, though in his case it was simply because he hadn't fit in at the company, and had botched the implementation of a new staffing formula.