Apple Loses to Cisco Systems

Apple has lost its senior VP of iPhone engineering. Mark Papermaster has changed his business address, moving from Apple to Cisco Systems according to the Wall Street Journal.
 
The wraparound antenna that caused such a flap when the iPhone 4 landed in consumer’s hands, certainly had an impact on Papermaster’s change of employment.

Papermaster will work under John McCool who is in charge of Cisco’s data center, switching, and services group. Cisco switches account for one third of the company’s third quarter revenue. However, that revenue has recently seen low growth and Cisco’s stock price is dropping.
 
Papermaster may or may not help Cisco’s fortunes. Trouble seems to follow him. His previous employer, IBM, obtained a settlement requiring him to certify during his Apple tenure that he had not disclosed any of IBM’s information.
 
Since he managed the PowerPC chip section at IBM, we wonder if that settlement will impact his work at Cisco where he will be in charge of creating chips to go into their hardware switches.