Apple poaches ex-Amazon, HP executive for growing software team

Apple has made a second big hire in a week, with the latest being an HP executive who was previously the chief technology officer of the "Lab126" devices group at Amazon and a vice president of software for the Kindle ecosystem.

Prior to his stint at Amazon, Jon McCormack was an executive in Google's Advanced Technology and Products group, as well as a software chief just before his arrival at Apple. He also worked for Amazon's secretive "Lab 126" said to be the company's research and development wing for devices.

Unlike Wednesday's hire of Google's John Giannandrea, it isn't clear at present precisely where McCormack will land at Apple. McCormack's LinkedIn profile now says that he is a VP of Software at Apple, but in what department specifically is unclear.

McCormack worked in parallel at Amazon for a time with David Foster, the "primary technical liaison" on the G4 and G5 towers, iMac and eMac families, the Xserve ecosystem, and specifically the iPod hard drive.

In the span of a month, Apple was rocked by not just one software bug, but several. One of them was one of Apple's most severe security-related flaws yet — the ability for a user to generate a Root account with the highest level of permissions possible, bypassing most of Apple's protections and security measures.

The fallout of the Root bug resulted in a series of crucial updates delivered through the App Store and automatically — with their own foibles. Another issue developed on Dec. 2 with the iOS Notifications center, culminating in the what was the be pre-emptive release of iOS 11.2 on the following Saturday morning, that brought its own problems.

It isn't clear if McCormack will be involved in feature development, or quality assurance.

Apple has recently released iOS 11.3 and macOS High Sierra 10.13.4, both with software fixes to many previous problems — but not without inducing some new issues and incompatibilities.