by Dan Moren
Siri officially moves from Eddy Cue to Craig Federighi
As Joe Rossignol at MacRumors points out, Apple’s update of its executive bios page contains an interesting tidbit:
Apple has updated its executive profiles to acknowledge that software engineering chief Craig Federighi now officially oversees development of Siri. The responsibility previously belonged to Apple’s services chief Eddy Cue.
This marks the second major transition for a department previously under Cue; in December 2015, Phil Schiller took over responsibility for the App Store, which had also previously been in Cue’s Services division.
Federighi seems a more natural choice for Siri; yes, it’s technically a service, but only insofar as answering queries gets routed through the network. The bulk of Siri–and really, the most important parts–is the software engineering. It is interesting to note, however, that Federighi’s bio says he oversees the development of “iOS, macOS, and Siri”, which seems to put the intelligent assistant on a footing with Apple’s two biggest platforms.
Likewise, Cue’s bio has some similarly interesting details. While his primary concerns seem to be media related, like the iTunes Store and Apple Music, he does maintain control of services like Apple Pay, Apple Maps, and iCloud. But he’s also in charge of the company’s productivity and creativity apps–presumably iWork, GarageBand, Final Cut Pro, etc.–which seems like an odd choice.1
Additionally: The bio page update also added two more people to the company’s second tier of executives: vice president of people Deirdre O’Brien and the vice president and managing director for Greater China, Isabel Ge Mahe.
- I guess they’re media-related? But that also might be one reason those apps seem to receive only sporadic updates. ↩