Random Thoughts

1) Amazingly enough, I’ve seen four (4!) movies in the last three months. One of them was Haywire, which was very good. Watching it, it occurred to me that Marvel ought to reboot Elektra with Carano. It’s a great character and she’s perfect for the role. Not just her physicality, but her ability to just stay silent onscreen and let everyone else act around her. All they need is a script.

2) After the Apple corporate shake-up announcement this week, suddenly Maps makes sense. Scott Forstall has long been suspected to be an eventual heir to Tim Cook’s throne. And Cook was widely assumed to be a transitional CEO, someone to bridge the gap and provide stability between the Jobs era and whatever APPL’s future turned out to be.

But maybe Cook doesn’t see himself as a transitional CEO. If Cook was looking to remove a threat to his regime, knowlingly pushing out a flawed Maps package with the iPhone 5, then uncharacteristically jumping on the grenade and admitting the product sucked makes more sense. Maybe it was all a trap for Forstall.

The fact that Forstall evidently refused to sign the APPL confession apology would only support this reading of events. Forstall saw himself being turned into the fall guy and decided he’d go down swinging. Cook then pivoted to take the heat himself publicly in order to build internal support against Forstall.

Seen in this light, maybe Maps wasn’t bad product design at all. Maybe it was a masterstroke of political infighting.