Their acquaintance dates from the early 1990's, when Mr. Schmidt, heading software at Sun, approached Mr. Jobs, then running Next Computer, about technical cooperation between the companies.
Mr. Serlet, 46, Apple's senior vice president for software engineering, left Xerox's fabled Palo Alto Research Center to join Steven P. Jobs at Next Software in the late 1980s and has headed software development at Apple since 2003.
"He's headed software companies, he founded the online bookstore that became the equivalent of Amazon in China, he chaired a company that did mobile software and he has also done a lot of venture capital investments in all areas of tech," says Mr Roy.
We've learned that in the next month, three key employees from the original, pre-acquisition team will be leaving, including Director of Marketing Stewart Langille, lead designer Justin Maxwell, and head software engineer Daryl Puryear.
Finnish mobile startup Jolla has always had a very visible front man in its leather-clad co-founder Marc Dillon — certainly ever since he stepped up from COO to CEO, back in fall 2012 (although he subsequently relinquished the CEO role to continue heading software dev from 2013).
