Yes, that’s Johnson’s old job, the one that he held for more than 10 years. And he was really, really good at it. The establishment of Apple Stores in 2001, which he helped implement, ushered in Apple’s greatest era of prosperity. With the physical stores’ minimalist design that perfectly reflected Apple’s ethos and aesthetic appeal, and a tightly curated range of products for sale, Johnson’s Apple Store concept has attracted millions of visitors each year and inspired many imitators, even among the company’s most direct competitors.

Granted, that’s partly why he left; to find a new challenge in the post-Steve Jobs era at Apple. But funny enough, Apple hasn’t found anyone to fill the position (at least anyone that would accept the job) that could live up to Johnson’s legacy. It certainly made an effort. But that effort involved hiring John Browett away from the U.K. discount electronics retailer Dixons, and it was a total bust. Browett was let go as SVP of Retail after less than a year; even he now says he was “a bad fit” at the company.

Johnson has been on the rocks for a while now at J.C. Penney too. The stock has tanked during his tenure.

Meanwhile, since Browett left in October, there has been no replacement. Cook has reportedly been searching for the right candidate, though it’s curious it has taken this long to find someone to fill such a plum post.

Perhaps today’s news offers a clue as to what Cook has been waiting for: to make an offer to Johnson.

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Credit: Asymco

Apple’s net sales have taken off since the dawning of the iPhone era. New store ribbon cuttings were at their highest in 2008 — 47 opened that year — when net sales were at about $10 billion. But since then, Apple’s net sales per year have reached $40 billion and store openings haven’t been opening at the same rate.

Also during that time, Apple’s revenue from sales in its own stores is compared to its revenues from third-party retail partners have been shrinking: Asymco notes that five years ago its own retail revenue was about $4.7 billion, or about 17 percent, while last year its $19.1 billion in retail revenue represented 12 percent.

Apple Stores are not just a place to sell things, of course. They’re customer service counters, customer education classrooms and show rooms for Apple style and culture. And they’re continuing to bring more customers into Apple’s ranks. But its expanding sales show that it needs more stores.

One of the things CEO Tim Cook mentioned as a priority in 2013 for Apple is that it will be investing “like crazy” in retail, specifically international retail stores in new countries. So far, however, it looks as though he’ll be doing that all without someone dedicated to guiding the retail ship.

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The move makes sense now given Google’s big push into physical (i.e. non-software) products including Chromebooks, Google TV, and Google Glasses. These are the kinds of products people want to touch and feel before buying. Microsoft launched its own retail stores (pictured above) a few years ago for many of the same reasons and is currently using those stores to drum up excitement around its new Surface devices and other products.

According to 9to5Google:

“The mission of the stores is to get new Google Nexus, Chrome, and especially upcoming products into the hands of prospective customers. Google feels right now that many potential customers need to get hands-on experience with its products before they are willing to purchase.”

The internet search giant is not totally new to the world of face-to-face retail sales: Best Buy hosts Google-themed stores in several locations.

Google could not be reached for comment.

 Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user blakespot

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On Monday CEO Tim Cook let two of his top executives go. While the departure of iOS software honcho Scott Forstall is getting most of the attention, the retail operations department lost its leader too: John Browett, who just joined Apple in January, was also shown the door Monday. It’s also nearly a year to the day that Apple’s valuable retail empire lost Ron Johnson, who had built Apple’s formidable retail operation from scratch, to JCPenney. But this time, Apple has to start a sudden search for a replacement from scratch and the timing is far from ideal.

Hoping for happier holiday sales

Between October and December 2011 the the company saw its best quarter ever; Apple sold 37 million iPhones, 15 million iPads, more than 5 million Macs and 15 million iPods. The retail operation alone made $6.1 billion in sales during that quarter, and Apple stores sold more iPhones, iPads and Macs than ever before. And it’s no coincidence it happened when it did: the last three months of the calendar year have long been the most lucrative for PC and consumer electronics companies.

Of course, the holiday shopping time is big for any retailer. But for Apple it’s becoming critical to its success — last holiday quarter brought in more than half of the company’s net income for the entire year. But as big as last year was, Cook is actually putting more pressure than ever on holiday sales now, and likely for the foreseeable future: he’s lined up all of Apple’s most important products for a holiday season debut. Every department is looking to beat last holiday’s record sales, but the iPhone and iPad teams are done pushing out products; it’s up to Apple’s retail and operations department to get those devices and services into customers’ hands now.

Who will lead them?

Browett’s exit was not surprising to people paying attention. He made a series of bad moves once he arrived from U.K.-based Dixon’s, most notably trying to cut back on staff in Apple stores in hopes of boosting profit. He also failed to open new stores in China at the rate Apple had forecast.

Still, his departure is not the same as Johnson’s planned exit — Johnson gave more than four months notice before he left to assume the chief executive spot at JC Penney. This was a quick firing and now Cook has to start an executive search. To figure out who he could be looking for, it’s useful to look back at what he did last time.

Finding the right resume

The 10-month long search took him to a company outsider with international experience from an electronics retailer. On paper, that reads well. In practice? It didn’t work out because Cook chose someone with a discounting and cost-cutting mentality.

This time around, Cook could look inside. Apple retail operations veterans were passed over before, such as VP of Retail Jerry McDougal. Would Cook give insiders who know Apple’s culture and corporate expectations a better look this time?

Sanlitun Apple Store, Beijing, China

It also seems like going with an electronics industry veteran wasn’t a great move. Apple doesn’t do electronics retail the way that Dixon’s, Best Buy or Fry’s does it. Perhaps Apple would be better suited to branch out to someone with experience in lifestyle retail, from Nike or Coach, someone who understands Apple’s extremely valuable brand. After all, Apple Stores are more lifestyle boutiques that happen to sell a limited amount of gadgets than a traditional electronics store anyway.

Global brand experience is a must, as is someone who knows how to operate a network of international stores. Apple’s growth is coming from outside the U.S.: Last holiday quarter in particular international accounted for 58 percent of Apple’s sales. Apple continues to grow in China — it will open its seventh store there next week. Apple had planned to hit 25 stores by the end of 2012, a goal it didn’t come close to hitting, so that’s likely to be an important priority for whoever fills this position. But it’s not just the Greater China region. Cook has said in the past the Apple would like to grow more in Brazil somewhere down the road too.

Whatever decision Cook makes is going to be watched carefully and have implications for the future of Apple’s growth and its very valuable retail brand. Doing this search while ramping up for the holiday isn’t ideal, although it’s possible Cook has been planning this move for a while: Browett was known to be on thin ice. But this does represent is a bigger and more symbolic opportunity for the company: to mix up the makeup of the leadership team so it’s not uniformly male and white.

As long as Cook is remaking the company into his own, it’s as good a time as any.

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The man responsible for the decision to experiment with a new “staffing formula” that cut employee hours and fired new hires is British retail veteran John Browett. He was hired earlier this year, after an exhaustive search, to take over the reins from Ron Johnson. And Browett’s approach to “bloated” staffing caused such consternation that Apple was forced to make a rare apology and admit that the changes were a mistake.

”Making these changes was a mistake and the changes are being reversed. … Our employees are our most important asset and the ones who provide the world-class service our customers deserve.”

Remember when Cook unveiled Browett as his first senior hire after taking the CEO job? Back in January, I wrote about the appointment and noted Browett’s experience at pile-em-high, sell-em-cheap retailers — a philosophy very much at odds with Apple’s.

As well as running electronics retail conglomerate DSG, which runs 1,200 large but not exactly liked stores in Britain, I pointed out his other connections and experience:

Browett cut his teeth with Tesco, the world’s third-largest retailer and a dominant force in British supermarket retailing. He was the man responsible for building Tesco’s online presence, creating a leading web-based grocery outlet and delivery service, and he also expanded the company’s ranges way beyond food. He’s also been on the board of EasyJet, the low-cost airline that became famous for its cheap and cheerful approach to flying, for the past five years.

Sure, Ron Johnson had made his name at Target, but it was hard to see how Browett’s cost-cutting approach meshed with Apple’s approach. And at the time, defending the appointment, Cook himself stepped up and said that “our retail stores are all about customer service” and that Browett “shares that commitment like no one else we’ve met.”

At the time, to anybody who had customer-level experience of the empires that Browett commanded, that rang false. Today, it looks like a bit of a joke.

The pressure’s surely going to be on him now. But he’s only doing what many of us expected — and it will be interesting to see how Cook responds.

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• Asymco does its own projections of the state of the PC market and wonders why lately there always an excuse for slipping PC sales: “There always seems to be a wrinkle, a quirk, or an exceptional circumstance that is to blame.”
• An op-ed in the New York Times explains Apple’s recently reported practice of not selling products to some Iranian-Americans. The piece, written by the head of the Iranian American National Council, outlines how U.S. trade sanctions on Iran effectively encourage businesses like Apple to practice racial profiling in order to follow the law.
• It turns out iPad-only newspapers aren’t great business after all. The New York Observer hears that News Corp.’s The Daily has lost $30 million and “will be reassessed after the November 6 election.”
• Aereo avoided an injunction on its TV service yesterday, and today Fortune explains how this temporary ruling could actually have an effect on any future Apple TV-related content plans.
• Up in Sun Valley, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes speculates about how a new Apple TV could work with cable partners to the New York Times. 

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Jony Ive is the driving force behind Apple's new product designs.

Apple has increased its research and development spending from $1.8 to $2.4 billion this year versus last, according to a filing made Wednesday by Apple to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). That’s a 33-percent increase, and makes the 2011 total more than half what it spent during the previous four years combined.

That’s a lot of money, but Apple’s year so far has been one of considerably earth-shaking transitions. The introduction of iCloud, its continued beta development and eventual release, can’t have come cheap, and it represents a paradigm shift in the focus of the company, something Steve Jobs conveyed on stage at WWDC in June. There’s also iOS 5 as a whole, which represents the biggest leap forward for iOS since it was first introduced.

Apple is also known to have its product pipeline planned out at least three years in advance. It’s quite possible that special attention was paid to Apple’s next big thing to follow the iPhone and iPad, especially because Jobs’ illness had progressed so much in the past year. Comments from his biography claim that he’d “finally cracked” a dedicated Apple television, which would definitely entail considerable R&D costs.

While in the past Apple has been praised for doing a lot of innovating for relatively little money, a heavy infusion of R&D money at this critical juncture in the company’s history is probably a good sign. Apple needs to wow customers to keep up investor confidence, and money invested in coming up with amazing products is a good way to do that. Also, Apple has a huge pile of cash reserves, so it definitely won’t miss the additional money.

Apple also experienced considerable growth in the area of its global workforce. Apple now employs 63,300 people worldwide, up 28 percent from last year. A lot of those new hires come on the retail side, which accounts for about half of its total employee head count. Apple has planned to open as many as 40 new stores by the end of the year.

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Exxon, an oil company, has seen its market cap steadily drop from a high of around $500 billion in 2009, while Apple’s has grown exponentially in that same time frame, thanks to successes like the iPhone and the iPad, along with a computer arm that has seen steady increases in sales. Market cap tends to reflect performance, and there’s little denying that Apple has been putting on quite a show in recent years, including a very successful last quarter.

Apple managed to handle the U.S.’s recent credit rating downgrade by the S&P with a bit more resilience than most, which probably helped it achieve this milestone today. But despite a bit of a resurgence yesterday for Apple, performance wasn’t so hot today for either company. Apple closed down 2.76 percent compared to yesterday, while Exxon fell further with a 4.41 percent drop.

Now that Apple’s on top, it just has to stay there. Continuing to do what it has been doing should be a pretty good way to accomplish that, but the company also appears to be hedging its bets with expert legal maneuvering. Considering that most analysts still have very ambitious target prices, it should stand a good chance of staying ahead for the near future.

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The new Waterloo location (at the Conestoga Mall) seems significant, considering that the city’s biggest claim to fame is being the home of RIM, maker of the BlackBerry smartphones and software. Apple’s other stores in Canada to date have generally been located either in major urban centers, or in communities bordering such metropolitan areas. Waterloo, a university town with a reputation for being Canada’s Silicon Valley, thanks in large part to RIM’s presence there, still only has a population of 98,000, swelling to around 120,000 during the post-secondary school year. Apple’s first Canadian store to venture outside of the major cities and their suburbs certainly comes with a provocative address.

Apple’s other new stores opening this Saturday include two in the U.S., and two abroad. Here’s the rest of list:

• Fashion Place, Murray, Utah
• Anchorage 5th Avenue Mall, Anchorage, Alaska
• Southland, Cheltenham, Victoria, Australia
• I Gigli, Florence, Italy

Apple’s planned retail expansion in 2011 includes a lot of international growth, and this crop of openings definitely reflects that. Any readers planning to pay a visit to any of these locations during their inaugural weekends?

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The WSJ has heard from unnamed sources that executive search firm Egon Zehnder International was selected by Apple because it wants to “consider executives who are based abroad.” The report also says CEO Steve Jobs was “extensively involved” in picking Egon Zehnder.

Apple representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

After 10 years as the VP of retail operations for Apple, during which he opened more than 300 Apple Stores, Johnson is set to become the CEO of clothing retailer JC Penney on Nov. 1.

The company’s iconic shops did $9 billion in sales worldwide last year, and that number is likely to go even higher this year. In the most recent quarter, Apple said stores accounted for $3.5 billion in revenue. And the company continues to open additional sites.

In Apple’s most recent earnings call, COO Tim Cook acknowledged that the stores that did the highest average revenue and saw the highest foot traffic were abroad, and more specifically, were in China. The company will continue to add stores outside the U.S., so it’s very reasonable that Apple would look to candidates who have experience in retail markets outside North America.

Thumbnail courtesy of  Flickr user jardenberg

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