News: Apple Shuffles and Promotes Some Executives

Some changes took place for Apple today—as announced in a press release, Jeff Williams is moving into Tim Cook’s old COO role, Johny Srouji has been promoted to executive level, Tor Myhren has been hired to work with graphic design and marking and communications, and finally, Phil Schiller will oversee the App Store across all platforms.

Apple today announced that Jeff Williams has been named chief operating officer and Johny Srouji is joining Apple’s executive team as senior vice president for Hardware Technologies. Phil Schiller, senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, will expand his role to include leadership of the revolutionary App Store across all Apple platforms. Apple also announced that Tor Myhren will join Apple in the first calendar quarter of 2016 as vice president of Marketing Communications, reporting to CEO Tim Cook. […]

In nearly eight years at Apple as vice president of Hardware Technologies, Johny Srouji has built one of the world’s strongest and most innovative teams of silicon and technology engineers, overseeing breakthrough custom silicon and hardware technologies including batteries, application processors, storage controllers, sensors silicon, display silicon and other chipsets across Apple’s entire product line. Educated at Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology, Johny joined Apple in 2008 to lead development of the A4, the first Apple-designed system on a chip. […]

Tor [Myhren from Grey Group] will succeed Hiroki Asai, who earlier announced plans to retire after 18 years in graphic design and marketing communications roles at Apple.

The moves makes sense, as Apple has been COO-less since Tim Cook took over the role as CEO, and Jeff Williams was already doing many of the tasks. Johny Srouji’s promotion to the executive team also makes sense since the A-series chips are very important to Apple’s business. Tor Myhren’s hire is purely a replacement move, and it sounds like he has the skills for the task. I suspect most of these moves will mean business-as-usual at Apple, but emphasizing some areas that are becoming more important.

As for Phil Schiller taking over all App Store operations, this might have been in the works for awhile, but I suspect this might have to do with some of the recent issues that Apple’s Mac App Store encountered.