It was at the very least his responsibility, and this story paints him as not accepting that responsibility. That doesn't look good. If the story is true, I'd consider it a big enough disagreement to remove someone over.
If Steve Jobs was talking about himself when he made that statement, then it's spot on. He micromanaged the shit out of that company and nearly always got his way. Fortunately, he did a hell of a job. If he screwed up though, he would have had not a single person to blame but himself, because he personally called most of the shots.
While I haven't been an executive at a billion dollar company, I have a good amount of leadership experience from my time in the military. I always try to be blatantly honest with myself and others. If I personally fuck something up, I tend to immediately own up to it and propose a solution. However, there have been a few very rare occasions where I've either had myself and my team thrown under the bus for something that was beyond our control, or failed to complete a task because it was simply impossible to achieve under the given deadline. Only a coward would let someone place undeserved blame on himself or his subordinates.
If you work with people that constantly offer excuses, even if they are "I was overruled", it is an awful work experience. Imagine you have to team up with that guy to code something and as soon as it goes wrong, he jumps to blame you. Even if it is entirely you're fault (you should claim it yourself, not be called out by a coworker), he still was working on the project. You can't expect to get anywhere by denying your involvement in toxic software that you are clearly involved in.
There is an even larger difference between being a person who is capable of recognizing when their employer is wrongfully blaming something on them and the person who constantly blames things on other people.
I don't know if applies in this situation or not. For all I know this guy could have personally written bad code for maps. The point is, universal statements such as "there is never it's not my fault at the executive level" are just plain false. It is an executive's fault if his subordinates do shitty work, but if the executive's boss ordered something that was impossible to accomplish with a given set of time, manpower, and resources then there is a good possibility that it isn't his fault. He might have to take the fall for it, but at the end of the day if that's what happened, then he knows he did the best he could and therefore shouldn't give a shit what anyone else thinks.
I love my job, I also loved having the opportunity to provide leadership and guidance for others. It is because of the love I had for my job that I would accept responsibility only for the things that are actually my fault(which includes the actions of my subordinates.) I understand that as a supervisor there's always the chance that I would get fired, demoted, or otherwise punished for a superior's mistakes, but that doesn't make it my fault or responsibility unless I actually made a mistake.
Steve Jobs can say "there is no it's not my fault" because at Apple, the buck stopped with him. I don't recall hearing anyone ever telling Steve Jobs that he couldn't do something, or overriding his design decisions. For lower levels of leadership, such as I experienced, there were about 50 different people who would constantly tell me what to do, even though only one person was actually tasked with doing so. Sometimes, my orders were poorly thought out. Sometimes they even contradicted orders given by other people. In situations like these, as I stated before, only a coward would accept the blame without evaluating the specific situation beforehand.
Your boss told you to use xyz technology? You (and others, if necessary) should have convinced him otherwise. If you can't and his decision is a bad one, you have to be the one that says no. That's right -- it's your job on the line, not his. If you signed up to be vp of IOS software, you're in the wrong if something is broken in IOS software. That's why you need to learn to say "no", not only to clients, but to coworkers as well. If that's absolutely not possible, it's time to put on your big boy/girl pants and take the blame because you couldn't fix a problem that you knew existed.
If you're in a situation where different people are telling you different things, then it sounds like you get to decide the specific implementation. It's even probable that those different people telling you different things are really giving you their unsolicited opinion, rather than micromanaging your career.
I think it's cowardly to avoid responsibility for what you sign your name to.
As far as having multiple people telling me what to do, I was mostly referring to my time in the military. Take my word for it, I wasn't expected to choose a specific implementation (unless it was theirs), and they were definitely not offering friendly advice!
The fact of the matter is that you can do your job extremely well, do everything right by any rational measure, have a strong political position, and yet still get screwed by unanticipated or uncontrollable external and internal forces, up to and including nonsense of others on the executive team, especially in an organization with a poor/weak/incompetent CEO or equivalent.
It happens all the time.
It's pretty easy and cheap to make a blanket "it's always your fault" statement, but back here in the real world it's typically much more nuanced and complicated.
There's a lot we don't know. Was the court case the result of political squabbling, or maybe there were disagreements as to its validity? There's a long line of decisions and personalities in play on the Apple side, and while I think in context we can riff on Maps being the straw that broke the camel's back (the firing was sooner after the apology than the apology was from the court order), we don't have the slightest inkling what the camel looks like, or even whether it's actually a camel.
He's a very smart guy, he simply may not have made it all the way into the consumer side. A Linux distribution should try to get a pro bono out of him while he has extra time.
Then you quit.
Sometimes the reason is that you can't see the forest for the trees because of your domain expertise.
If the higher ranking person has a decent level of clue, they'll always be aware that they're basically -betting- that they're right about it being the latter rather than the former.
If the higher ranking person has any level of personal honour, they'll precommit to taking full responsibility for anything that goes wrong as a result ... and to quietly letting you keep any glory that accrues for it going right, on the assumption that that was likely mostly a result of your decisions, not of their single override.
Given the preconditions of your boss having clue and honour, quitting should not be the automatic response to their overriding you even if you don't immediately understand why they're doing so.
In fact, I'd suggest that if you don't trust them sufficiently to accept that they'll only do it in cases where they genuinely believe they have a better reason than your reasons for disagreeing, you should be trying to move elsewhere right now, because you have no faith in your superior's ability to use their power appropriately, which is going to be no fun for anybody.
Better would be to make sure that you have good documentation of the event in the case of the shit hitting the fan.
Get convinced of the CEO strategy and execute it, or stay convinced, convince the board and do your way - and in either case, take responsibility for whatever happens to the company in the whole, there is no such thing as "your separate area" or "only your direct actions/subordinates" at that level.
If he can do his job and do it so well that the company is known for shipping times then what could you possibly tell him about why your product doesn't work? It's too hard?
But assuming he was, surely you aren't suggesting that Apple's speedy delivery times are the pinnacle of human achievement, and that by their accomplishment of this, that every other human undertaking must be trivial.
Writing a Google maps clone is extremely difficult, and if Apple expected to be successful with it already with the meager amount of resources they have put into it, then it was an impossible task and I'd be delighted to tell Tim Cook, that it was in fact, too hard.
As it has been mentioned elsewhere, Google has like 7000 people working on maps, while Apple has 13000 people period. It's doubtful that they would have over 60 percent of their workforce plugging away on a maps clone, so clearly they can't expect their program to be better, especially when Google has been doing this for several years already.
But my comment wasn't even intended to excuse the state of IOS Maps, I was simply pointing out that while we don't know for sure what happened, there are some possible scenarios where the failure wasn't this guy's fault. I was also pointing out that the statement "there is no such thing as not my fault" at the executive level, it a statement that is only true when an executive is given free reign over his work, without anyone else overriding or commandeering.
And yes, speedy delivery time is an achievement. It might be for computers in this instance but militaries and countries are run on their logistics. While we take for advantage shopping for fresh food most people don't realise the amount of preparation that goes into getting fruit to ripen in the stores.
So no, I don't think Maps are hard. The hard part (data acquisition) has already been done. But it can't be a "hobby" either. If they were planning to do their own maps, and the purchase of C3 and Placebase years ago meant they were, they could have looked around and saw that Nokia, Microsoft, and Google, were shelling out serious cash to get it right Apple spending a tenth of that was naive.
As CEO, Cook was right take the blame. If he publicly passed the buck to Forstall I would seriously question his leadership.
I see the truth in that, but you have to admit Jobs was probably the person for whom it was easiest to make this admonition.