CUE
Eddy

• 1. Career
• 1.1. Early career (1990s)
• 1.2. Today (2011–present)

Eddy Cue is Apple's senior vice president of Services, reporting to CEO Tim Cook. Cue oversees Apple's numerous content stores including the iTunes Store, the iBooks Store, and Apple Music, as well as Apple Pay, Siri (until 2017), Maps, iAd, iCloud services, and Apple's productivity and creativity apps. Cue testified in the antitrust case against Apple for conspiring on eBook pricing.

Career

Early career (1990s)

Cue joined Apple in 1989, and was instrumental in creating the Apple online store in 1998, the iTunes Store in 2003 and the App Store in 2008. In his early years at Apple, he was a manager of software engineering and customer support teams. In 1999, he convinced Apple to work with Akamai Technologies Inc. on new streaming functions for its QuickTime video software. He also played a key role in developing Apple's iLife suite of applications, namely iBooks, the iAd advertising service, and Apple's App Store of more than 700,000 applications. Cue is widely known at Apple for turning around its failed products, such as the MobileMe data syncing service as well as iCloud in 2011, which now has more than a quarter billion users. Likewise, Cue is famous for advising Steve Jobs to consider creating a smaller version of the iPad based on his own experience with the product. While Jobs was originally against the idea, Tim Cook eventually agreed with the concept upon becoming CEO after Jobs' death.

Today (2011–present)

As senior vice president of Services (previously the senior vice president of Internet Software and Services), Cue has addressed Apple's mobile maps, iCloud, and iMessage outages. Additionally, Cue took command of Apple's voice-activated assistant Siri. However, this service was delegated to Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering and subsequently to John Giannandrea Apple's senior vice president of AI/ML. Cue's responsibilities as leader of iTunes has included attending to the rise of streaming services, supported by Apple's competition with Spotify and recent acquisition of Shazam. In response to the rise of video streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and HBO, Cue has led Apple's new effort to create its own original content. In 2017, it was announced that Apple had set aside nearly $1 billion to produce original video content to compete with HBO, Amazon, and Netflix. With a base salary of $1,000,000, $1,790,000 in bonuses and incentives, and $20,000,083 in stock, Cue earned over $22.8 million in total compensation during the 2016 fiscal year for his leadership and performance.

In April 2021, it was revealed that Cue had initially pushed to bring iMessage to Android in 2013, but was overruled by other executives.