[llbowers]

"Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, who has now also taken over the company’s legendary design studio."

This might be a dumb question, but does the COO usually manage design? Our COO is very much a supply chain, logistics, procurement and day-to-day administration type manager. I can't imagine him having any sort of sense of good design.

I'm sure he's (he as in Apple's COO) not there in the design trenches on the daily, but he would have final say on overall design, unless I'm misinterpreting what it means in the article.

To be fair I probably would've said the same thing for a CEO before Steve Jobs came along but he's proven himself to a be very rare exception.

[claudiawerner]

This also confuses me in politics. In one administration a particular member of the cabinet is justice secretary, and in the next election he's an education secretary. I am highly sceptical of the idea that they've studied the intricacies of effective pedagogy in order to get that job.

[TheOtherHobbes]

The jobs are awarded on the basis of political loyalty, ambition, and tribal (party) potential, not domain competence.

In the UK - and I guess the US - they're executive roles. The Prime Minister's office sets policy, with varying levels of debate and pushback, and the department heads implement it.

Executives who climb high enough are allowed to suggest policy of their own, under the oversight of the PM. Ministers direct implementation, but the details of execution are handled by the Civil Service.

No competence is needed. In fact in the last decade or so in the UK most of ministers were absolutely incompetent dolts elevated to purely political appointments - with results that surprised no one.

[claudiawerner]

There seems to be no other explanation for the borderline ridiculous proposals that keep making their way into laws, including but certainly not limited to CAJA 2009 which criminalizes sexual drawings of fictional underage characters - which they admitted in their own reports wasn't based on any empirical evidence and in fact only on hearsay and faulty reasoning from the likes of children's charity workers.

This is an egregious case with the chance to ruin lives (in fact, a substantial number of people are convicted under it each year according to stats in the VAWG report) but I wonder what other deplorable incompetence I'm missing out on seeing from the UK government.

[Despegar]

The titles at Apple don't really translate to other companies. Product marketing at Apple for example decides on how big features work.

[dmix]

I can see the connection between a Product marketing person and feature development. The connection between the guy responsible for supply chains and operations and product/software design seems a bit weird to me.

But I guess Steve Jobs trusted Tim Cook enough to take over the reigns and he was a COO.

[Despegar]

Industrial Design works hand-in-hand with Operations. One without the other means products that can't scale to hundreds of millions at good quality.

https://blog.bolt.io/manufacture-like-apple/

[pcurve]

"This might be a dumb question, but does the COO usually manage design?"

I don't think so, but it's not unusual to have CTO, CIO report into COO. I'm guessing there will eventually be a dedicated CDO or a de facto CDO that reports into Williams.

[giobox]

It’s purely speculation on both our parts, but the CDO title was, one could argue, an honorific specifically for Ives and a recognition of his sizeable achievements.

There is no precedent at Apple for it (or many other companies for that matter). While if any company should have such a position it’s Apple, I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t come back anytime soon.

[zeckalpha]

Supply chain certainly seems like an important factor into design at Apple scale.