Apple's Scott Forstall Gone.

Scott Forstall and retail VP John Browett, will be leaving Apple. . The management team will get more streamlined as Forstall’s responsibilities are redistributed to other VPs, while the retail team will report directly to Tim Cook until a replacement is found.
The move came as a surprise. With the nation’s media focused on Hurricane Sandy (and the New York Stock Exchange closed down ahead of the storm), Apple issued a quiet press release announcing the shakeup — and just hours after major product announcements from competitors Google and Microsoft.
Forstall has been with Apple since 1997 and began his post-graduate career with Steve Jobs at NeXT. He eventually came to manage what became Mac OS X and then, later, Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS. In the Apple v. Samsung proceedings in San Jose, California, Forstall said that he had about 1,000 people reporting directly to him.
“He’s clearly a highly visible senior leader on the Apple team, having driven the success of iOS,” Forrester analyst Charles Golvin told Wired. Still, there were signs that something like this might be coming. Forstall sold off 95 percent of his stocks for a cool $38.7 million back in May. And though he has appeared onstage at nearly every Apple media event in recent years to demo iOS features, he did not present at last week’s iPad mini event.
Apple announced a broad redistribution of Forstall’s duties. Craig Federighi, current head of Mac software engineering, will now head up both iOS and OS X. And design chief Jony Ive will now be in charge of both human interface and industrial design across the company. Eddy Cue will take over responsibilities of Siri and Maps, in addition to his role as senior VP of Internet Software and Services (which includes the iTunes Store and iCloud). Bob Mansfield will lead a new group called Technologies, which will foster innovation at a higher level and control Apple’s semiconductor teams, “who have ambitious plans for the future.”
Apple has come under fire for problems with iOS 6′s Maps feature and the less-than-stellar performance of Siri in iOS 5.
The move to oust Browett may be less surprising. Browett reportedly cut a number of retail staff positions in Apple Stores in order to cut costs, a move that was later deemed a mistake and quickly reversed. However, the double axing — the details of which are still murky — is very unusual.
“One thing we generally don’t see from Apple’s management is a lack of stability, a frequent turnover of responsibility,” Golvin said. “Now we’ve seen them lose the leaders of the retail organization twice in the last 16 months.” Retail chief Ron Johnson left Apple Nov. 1 last year.