Om and Gruber are having a public disagreement about Eddie Cue.

My comments (made on Leo LaPorte’s Twit) about Apple, Eddy Cue and the fragile state of iCloud services have struck a nerve, with most disagreeing with me and only a few actually agreeing with the gen

Source: Gruber & I disagree about a few issues about Apple

The basic story is that Cue was at a basketball match when iCloud was experiencing an outage. Om says that Cue should have left the match to lead his times, Gruber thinks that Cue was allowed to stay because he couldn’t have helped anyway.

I think Gruber is missing the point — attending a game when a division you are responsible for is down for six hours is a clear lack of empathy for the customers, and also is a sign that standards are falling of what used to be an Apple Standard for building products of delight. Sure, things might have taken as much time to fix the iCloud, but the message you would have sent out to rest of the Apple team would have been different.

I believe deeply that they’re both wrong, and worse, we’ll never know if Cue is doing this right.

As the leader of an engineering team, Cue’s role is to lead the post incident process. It’s true that he can’t do much in the heat of the moment except “cheer lead” the team.

However, the following weeks are far more important. Did he lead the post incident review, follow up on the identified problems, get a full and frank root cause analysis? Only if changes to infrastructure and process are made will he have delivered.

This is his role and it helps if he isn’t part of the incident and has nothing to hide.