Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has a new vice president of technology as reported earlier this week. To recap: Kevin Lynch will be leaving his post as Adobe’s Chief Technology Officer to join Apple, where he will be a vice president of technology reporting to Bob Mansfield. Mr. Lynch had joined Adobe in 2005 when the company acquired Macromedia. Adobe said Mr. Lynch would leave effective March 22.
Goldman has a new report on the announcement. They note that Bob Mansfield, a senior vice president at Apple, was once Apple’s head of engineering and now leads the company’s Technologies group, which houses all of Apple’s wireless and semiconductor teams. Mr. Lynch’s transition to Apple deepens the executive leadership bench at the company. This represents the second high-profile executive hire for Apple this year. This January, former Xerox CFO Luca Maestri also made the move to Apple, and now serves as vice president and corporate controller.
So what will Lynch’s role be at Apple. That is the million dollar question.
Daniel Eran Dilger of AppleInsider notes:
However, Flash isn’t the only project Lynch has worked on. He has roots in developing software titles for the Macintosh back to his college years, and his bio (still hosted by Adobe) cites early work in the mid 90s developing user interface elements at General Magic, a portable computing company Apple spun offin 1990 to focus its efforts on the Newton Message Pad.
Lynch also “designed the user interface and developed the first Macintosh release” of Frame’s FrameMaker publication layout software (later acquired by Adobe) as well as Macromedia’s Dreamweaver, one of the original graphical desktop web development tools (which was also acquired by Adobe). At Macromedia, Lynch served as “chief software architect and president of product development.”
Regardless of what Lynch will be doing, Apple is facing more competition as a result of the new BB10 and the Samsung Galaxy S4.
Morgan Stanley put out a very bullish report on BB10 recently. However, the analysts note ‘clearly the largest risk to our thesis is that demand for BB10 slows dramatically in the near-term, resulting in high return rates, sharp discounting and therefore lower ASPs and margins.
Additionally, Morgan states’there’s also a risk that the Z10 price points in India and Indonesia may be too high at ~$700-800 and might price BBRY out of those markets.’
How does this relate to Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)? Morgan Stanley believes that apple is the final threat, and it plans to expand into Asia, specifically India. They note that Apple appears to be getting more aggressive in India with its new installment plan which could also make the iPhone more affordable than a Blackberry presuming BBRY does not match those plans, while the still relatively low app count could continue to drive buyers away from the Blackberry.
