Jeff Williams, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Operations and the guy in charge of the development of the Apple Watch, is scheduled to speak at Re/code’s Code Conference later this month, the publication confirmed Thursday morning.
The second Code Conference runs from May 26 to May 28 in Rancho Palos Verdes, California — just two weeks ahead of Apple’s annual developer conference serving as a launchpad for iOS/OS X platform advances.
At last year’s inaugural Code Conference, Apple originally planned on dispatching its online services and software engineering chiefs, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi. But the $3 billion Beats buy had Apple change its mind and replace Federighi with Beats co-founder and music mogul Jimmy Iovine, who mostly discussed the Beats acquisition at the event.
Other tech and media heavyweights scheduled to speak at the conference include GM CEO Mary Barra, Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti, Xiaomi’s international head Hugo Barra, Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure, Reddit’s interim CEO Ellen Pao, GoPro CEO and founder Nick Woodman, Snapchat’s Evan Speigel, Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, Oculus VR’s Brendan Iribe, CBS CEO Les Moonves, Google business lead Omid Kordestani, Target CEO Brian Cornell and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.
These speaker appearances are typically conducted as on-stage live interviews with journalists Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.
Back when current CEO Tim Cook was Apple’s chief of operations, Williams was his right-hand man so it’s not surprising that Cook promoted him to handle Operations soon after Cook himself took the CEO job.
Prior to joining Apple in 1998, Williams worked for IBM from 1985 to 1998 in a number of operations and engineering roles. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from North Carolina State University and an MBA from Duke University.
“In 2007, Jeff played a significant role in Apple’s entry into the mobile phone market with the launch of the iPhone, and he has led worldwide operations for iPod and iPhone since that time,” reads his bio page on Apple’s website.
In addition to leading Apple’s teams responsible for end-to-end supply chain management and making sure trains run on time, Williams is also in charge of the Apple Watch development and health-related services (he presented ResearchKit at a March media event in March).
It’s very likely that Apple’s wearable, health and fitness initiatives will be among the main topics of the interview.
Re/code will be putting up extensive video clips of the interviews immediately, and the entire sessions soon after, and we’ll be scrutinizing each and every sentence, punctuation and thought to bring you our analysis and the latest news as it unfolds.
Source: Re/code