Scott Forstall, Apple's senior vice president of iOS software, is smart, slick and ambitious -- and is plainly gunning for the job of Apple's chief executive, according to a new tell-all book.
Adam Lashinsky, author of "Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired -- and Secretive -- Company Really Works," writes that Forstall, 43, is nakedly ambitious, is cultivating influential friends within the company and is a stand-out to move up in the company.
"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."
Lashinsky, unlike Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson, didn't have Jobs' corporation or access to Apple employees, so the book is full of accounts from competitors, former employees and others not active on the Cupertino campus.
Nonetheless, Jobs, CEO Tim Cook and design chief Jonathan Ive still take up a lot of real estate in the book, but it's Forstall fingered as the one most likely to succeed as Jobs' visionary. The Stanford graduate joined Apple in 1997 and was one of the original architects of Mac OS X.
This could be a headache for Cook, who must run the company and keep looking over his shoulder to see if Forstall is making a power play for his job. We hope that Forstall waits on doing that -- the iOS is the most profitable arm of Apple right now -- and learns more about the working of the company if he hopes one day to run it.
