Twenty years ago, Apple CEO Steve Jobs dismissed Ron Okamoto from Adobe to become vice president of developer relations and later help build the App Store. Now, we are discovering that he retired – less than two months before Apple’s App Store started testing.
The Mark Gurman eagle eye in Bloomberg realized that not only was Okamoto listed as a potential witness in that trial, but that court documents describe him as the old one VP of developer relations around the world, not the current one. Bloomberg is reporting that he has been replaced by Susan Prescott, a product marketing executive who started to become one of the company’s public faces in 2015.
Okamoto is yet to be deposed at the trial, but perhaps for less than an hour. He will apparently testify about the App Store’s policies, the business model, how it compares to the development for macOS and the “transformation of the application software business”.