Apple Makes Highly Eccentric Hire

Apple polished its reputation as a contrarian Tuesday when the news broke because of an SEC filing that it had hired Adobe’s CTO Kevin Lynch to be VP of technology and reportedly coordinate its hardware and software teams. Adobe confirmed his departure effective Friday, March 22. He will report to SVP Bob Mansfield, Apple’s core hardware maven, who leads Apple’s Technologies Group, which includes its wireless and semiconductor interests. Provocatively Mansfield is scheduled to retire from Apple for the second time next year. Lynch, a Macromedia legacy, violently backed Mobile Flash to the hilt as a sine qua non platform long after Steve Jobs famously blasted the widgetry’s reliability, security, performance and battery life problems, chalking it up as bad, inelegant software and barring it from the iPhone and the iPad. The news of Lynch going to Apple lit up the blogosphere but left the question of why Apple hired him unanswered.

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