A recent tweet by Jon Frott of CNBC informed that Adobe’s CTO Kevin Lynch has resigned from Adobe to join Apple in the capacity of Vice President of Technology, directly reporting to Senior Vice President of Technology at Apple, Bob Mansfield. Adobe later gave an official statement stating Lynch to be departing from Adobe and wished him good luck for his future endeavours. According to Adobe’s website Lynch played a prime role in many of Adobe’s technologies after he moved on to Adobe from Macromedia few years ago when Macromedia was acquired by Adobe. Flynch’s key roles included involvement in high support of Flash and his fight against Apple in 2010 to include Flash on iOS, development and management of PDF format and support and development of various cloud services at Adobe.
With the departure of Scott Forstall, the ex iOS prime at Apple, there was a real need of technology head at Apple to manage various aspects of iOS and few multi system softwares at Apple. There was a dire need for Apple to high technology architects and experts to rapidly expand its services base and make a stronger competitive presence in the market.
Hiring Adobe and Macromedia employees is nothing new to the company, Apple’s current Senior Vice President of worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller, hails from Adobe as well and had a strong presence in development of Flash at Macromedia back then. Currently the role of Lynch at Apple is still not clear but sources say that even Apple has no clear cut role definition for Lynch and would decide upon his role only once things get going and they spot a real need for his presence in a particular area.