Apple ‘ousts Siri boss,’ finally taking failures seriously

Macworld

The accumulated failures and humiliations that have dogged Siri in recent years have finally proved too much for Apple’s senior management, who have decided to oust John Giannandrea from his role as Siri boss.

The news was broken Thursday by the Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, citing the usual anonymous “people familiar with the situation.” Gurman’s sources say Apple CEO Tim Cook has lost faith with Giannandrea’s ability “to execute on product development” and is replacing him as Siri lead with Mike Rockwell, currently vice-president of the Vision Products Group. Gurman adds that Apple responded to his initial article by announcing the move internally, but it hasn’t yet made any public statement.

It appears from the report that Giannandrea is not being fired, and will remain with the company in a more limited role covering other aspects of Apple’s AI work. His future prospects at Apple, however, might be less than stellar after this setback. Giannandrea, who at time of writing remains on the Apple Leadership page as Senior Vice President, Machine Learning and AI Strategy, was brought in from Google in 2018 with a remit to get Apple’s AI efforts up to scratch.

Mike Rockwell is an interesting and in many ways less obvious choice as his replacement. He oversaw the successful completion of the Vision Pro project, which gives him considerable kudos within the company–as Steve Jobs once said, real artists ship–but it can hardly be said to have set the world alight and remains a niche product with (as expected) few sales. As Gurman notes, he had little experience in AI and machine learning before starting work on Vision Pro, whereas Giannandrea spent eight years running Google’s Machine Intelligence, Research and Search department before arriving at Apple Park.

But something had to change. Siri has been an unreliable voice assistant for many years and shows little sign of improvement, with the much-touted and AI-powered ‘new Siri’ endlessly delayed and currently not expected until 2026 at the earliest. A truly modernised version might not be here until 2027. (Another Siri exec, Robby Walker, reportedly called these delays “ugly and embarrassing,” and he’s not wrong.) Giannandrea has been given plenty of time to sort this out, and now that time has run out.