In yet another movement at the top of the Applethe company’s chief executive responsible for cloud initiatives, Michael Abbottwill leave the company, according to information provided by journalist Mark Gurman, from Bloomberg.
Abbott will step down in April, according to an anonymous source. His departure will leave a big hole in one of the company’s most important divisions, as he manages not only the iCloud and the infrastructure for services such as iMessage and the FaceTimeas well as the company’s main communication services, including the resource Look for (Find My) and the Emergency SOS.
He also manages the CloudKit, a service that developers can use to power third-party applications for educational and business users. In addition, he is also responsible for the privacy and security engineering of Apple services.
He will be the second subordinate of the head of services, Eddy Cue, leaving Apple this year. As we reported, Peter Stern, another (former) employee of Cue’s division, left the company at the end of January.
In recent years, Abbott has hired several leaders in the cloud services industry to bolster Apple’s operations, but the onboarding of these talents “has not gone as smoothly as some inside the company had hoped,” according to Gurman.
Abbott held his position for five years; he joined Apple in 2018 following serving as an investor at venture capital giant Kleiner Perkins. He was also an executive at Twitter and Microsoft.
Also according to Gurman, Jeff Robbin (known as the creator of iTunes and vice president of engineering) will assume the executive’s responsibilities.