The Wall Street Journal reports this evening that Apple has amended its bylaws to make it easier for long-time shareholders to nominate to the company’s board of directors. This makes Apple the latest company to adopt what is commonly referred to as “proxy access.”
Apple today has updated the biography of Lisa Jackson on its executive leadership webpage, noting that she is now Vice President of Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives. Previously, Jackson was the VP of Environmental Initiatives only. The promotion will allow Jackson to take over leadership of all governmental affairs and public policy teams, according to Apple.
(Update: He’s back. Whew!)
Early Monday morning, Jonathan Ive, Apple’s VP of design, disappeared from the list of executives on Apple’s website. While this type of thing has usually only happened when an executive left the company, there’s no reason to believe this is more than a website glitch at this point.
In the past whenever someone has been removed from the list, his accompanying personal page was also deleted. For example, the link to Scott Forstall’s bio now leads to an error page. Ive’s, on the other hand, is still up and running. Apple would also likely issue a press release if such a high-ranking member of its team was suddenly out.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3H8v5XEkVAk]
Update: Apple had these videos taken offline. We will make an effort to see if they exist somewhere else. Help us out in the comments if you find them.
Former Apple marketing executive Bob Borchers, who was part of the original iPhone team and helped lead the Nike+iPod partnership and third-party iPod integration with car manufacturers, recently gave a talk at a school in California to discuss his experiences at Apple (part 2 below). In case you are unfamiliar, you might remember Borchers from several “guided tour” videos for iPhone and other Apple products a few years back. He has also been a source for many of the interesting stories coming from Adam Lashinsky’s new book “Inside Apple.”
At the starting of his talk to students, Borchers surveys the crowd to find out the ratio of Android users to iPhone users, leading him to joke: “Alright that’s good. I’ll keep my Apple stock.” As a former marketing executive, Borchers showed and talked about a few ads, but also discussed the AT&T partnership, as he noted, “We broke rules in terms of how we worked with folks like AT&T”:
“AT&T as a company… they buy the cellphones and then they sell them to you and I… we said, ‘no we don’t want to do that’. We want to be able to sell the iPhone. We want to be able to talk directly to the customer. That was a big, big change for the industry.”
Other than telling some recent stories that have debuted in “Inside Apple,” Borchers also talked about Steve Jobs’ initial mission to create the iPhone, describing the late CEO as wanting to create “the first phone people would fall in love with.” He also discussed how important the multitouch display and having the full “Internet in your pocket” was to the original concept. Before wrapping up his speech, Borchers talked about how the iPhone was developed from his point of view on the product marketing/product management team and the importance of Apple packaging: