Richard Williamson
The decision to replace Google (GOOG) Maps with an in-house creation that by Tim Cook’s own admission wasn’t ready for prime time continues to send shock waves through the ranks of Apple’s (AAPL) leadership team.
On Tuesday, four weeks after Cook accepted the resignation of Scott Forstall — one of Steve Jobs’ favorite executives — and charged Eddie Cue with fixing the Maps app, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Adam Satariano reported that Cue had fired Richard Williamson, the manager who oversaw the team that created it.
Citing unnamed “people familiar with the move,” Satariano says that Cue is soliciting advice from outside mapping-technology experts and pushing digital maps provider TomTom NV (TOM2) to fix the landmark and navigation data it shares with Apple.
According to Williamson’s LinkedIn profile, he’d been at Apple for 12 years, first as a senior software engineer, then as a director of iOS software and finally as senior director, iOS platform services. He had previously worked for Jobs at NeXT between 1987 and 1994 before leaving to found Infoscape.