Slashdot Mirror
How Tim Cook Is Filling Steve Jobs's Shoes
The New York Times, in an article about Apple CEO Tim Cook, focuses in large part on the ways in which Cook is not Jobs. He's less volatile, for one thing, whether you think that means he's less passionate or just more circumspect. A small slice: Lower-level employees praise Mr. Cook’s approachability and intellect. But some say he is less hands-on in developing products than his predecessor. They point to the development of the so-called iWatch — the “smartwatch” that Apple observers are eagerly awaiting as the next world-beating gadget. Mr. Cook is less involved in the minutiae of product engineering for the watch, and has instead delegated those duties to members of his executive cabinet, including Mr. Ive, according to people involved in the project, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to press. Apple declined to comment on the watch project. ... Mr. Cook has also looked outside of Apple for experienced talent. He has hired executives from multiple industries, including Angela Ahrendts, the former head of Burberry, to oversee the physical and online stores, and Paul Deneve, the former Yves Saint Laurent chief executive, to take on special projects. He also hired Kevin Lynch, the former chief technology officer of Adobe, and Michael O’Reilly, former medical officer of the Masimo Corporation, which makes health monitoring devices. Not to mention the music men of Beats.
errrr... by not having pancreatic cancer?
link?
Jobs was a right-brain leader. Creativity and creative genius cannot be emulated or duplicated. People should stop thinking that someone can just come in and do the same things he did, think the way he thought. It's impossible. Find another, equally brilliant right-brain thinker and maybe you have a shot at a new era of Apple that is reminiscent of building things around sacred geometry, art and magic - but new and different on its own merits.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/technology/tim-cook-making-apple-his-own.html?_r=0 Here I've saved the pain in case you actually RTFA...
hey mods where is the link for this article? I know reading the article is an optional slashdot activity that only some members participate in, but on this occasion i wished to read the article and was unable. I could google and find it myself but that defeats half the purpose of coming to slashdot.org so now i guess i'll look at something else.
Your Friend
A.C.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/technology/tim-cook-making-apple-his-own.html
Apple ditched Chiat/Day and is using an in-house advertising team.
That doesn't seem to fit the mold the NY Times is trying to push.
How Tim Cook Is Filling Steve Jobs's Shoes
Cook is not filling Steve Jobs' shoes. Steve Jobs' shoes are in a display case at Apple's museum. Cook is wearing his own shoes.
Cook is not Jobs nor is he trying to be Jobs nor should he try to be Jobs. Jobs made lots of product design and development mistakes. His genius was in exploiting those projects where time and circumstances made them successful, in pretty much maximizing the potential of the products that turned out to be successful. In 2001 Jobs brought us both the iPod and the Flower Power iMac.
Cook has to use his own judgement, things Jobs said years ago don't necessarily apply any more. Time and circumstances have changed. The iPad mini is a good example. When Jobs frowned upon a smaller iPad a smaller device meant a lower resolution screen. Once pixel densities improved and a smaller device could have the same resolution as the original full sized device the circumstanced changed such that Jobs' original judgement no longer applied.
Jobs' good decisions have a time and a context. They are not necessarily universal truths. His shoes don't need to be worn.
Why do we care?
Why do we care?
Because people like you will read and/or comment on the posting rather the ignore it and move on to something else.
If she can sell their hideous branded goods, she is surely a mistress of consumerism and should be applauded.
That's how he's filling his shoes; poorly. The ipad 3 was heavier, shattered easier at a lower drop height, and got hotter. The ipad 3 mini was a lie. IOE 6, 7, and 8 were universally hated disasters. iTunes 11's new layout was a crime against software design. Also, as usual, everyone everywhere is suing them for everything they're doing. Apple is going down like the Titanic.
"...so-called iWatch — the “smartwatch” that Apple observers are eagerly awaiting as the next world-beating gadget"
so.. like every other wearable announced?
and... looks like the motorola 360 is the shit to beat by a long margin - if its anything close to what has been shown off..
According to this article Apple bought Beats because the Apple brand is fading. Tim Cook is buying what Steve Jobs created from within.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
But some say he is less hands-on in developing products than his predecessor.
The best leaders will see their own shortcomings and delegate to trusted experts to pick up their slack. Perhaps this is Cook's strategy.
Best joke posted to Slashdot this month, thank you!
Perl Programmer for hire
What is responsible for the state of Apple today? It is the cult-like mindset that affects so many of Apple's customers.
Yes, and that cult was created and centered around Jobs. He created the market for Apple products and the aura around them.
Cough cough Weren't the iPod, iTunes, and what OS X was based upon all created outside Apple and therefore bought in? Cough Cough
Time and circumstances have changed. The iPad mini is a good example. When Jobs frowned upon a smaller iPad a smaller device meant a lower resolution screen. Once pixel densities improved and a smaller device could have the same resolution as the original full sized device the circumstanced changed such that Jobs' original judgement no longer applied
Ignoring the fact that when the ipad mini came out it was the low resolution device (1024×768 px at 163 ppi). Steve jobs had already launched the iphone 4 with its *cough* retina display (960×640 at 326 ppi) two years earlier.
You seen to forget that Jobsy(I like to park in handicapped space) was not the density of pixles...bit the size of the display to quote the foul smelling genius "It's meaningless unless your table includes sandpaper," Jobs said, "so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of their present size." He said 7-inch screens were actually 45 per cent the size of an iPad, which wasn't sufficient.
"Apple has done extensive user testing and we really understand this stuff," he added. "There are clear limits on how close you can place things on a touchscreen, which is why we think 10 inches is the minimum screen size to create great tablet apps.
Lets not start using words like "universal truths"(sic) when you are at best misinformed
Jobs was merely a prophet within the religion of Apple. He was a messenger, at best. That's why the religion has outlived him. It doesn't depend on any one messenger. It's about the (false?) hope it gives people who buy such products. It's this market, the market for a cause for these social rejects to rally around, that existed independent of Jobs, and still exists very strongly today even though he has been dead for some time. The messenger is irrelevant; it's the cause that's most significant.
Maybe Apple could make a comeback under Scott McNealy, former head of SUN Microsystems.
What is a Motorola 360? I have never ever seen one in use, nor a Sammy gear or a google glass for that matter. I guarantee that when apple sells 10 million iwatchrd the first year, we will all see them everywhere. And yes, I know what a moto 360 is, I'm just proving a point. Also, nobody knows what the iwatch will look like.
I have no idea how successful the iwatch will be, what I do know, it is already a long way from being perceived as being first. It is not walking into a market which has years of necessary frand patents. It is walking into a market with large companies Sony; Samsung; Google already having products(some on their second generation) and patents. Whatever the iwatch looks like they changed the game...and it is costing them now. Oh and I like the look of the Motorola 360 too, so its looking pretty good for an unlauched product.
The New York Times article Slashdot mentioned, Tim Cook, Making Apple His Own, is an example of the collapse of the New York Times.
... will join Apple." The Wall Street Journal's novelists say Apple is "Tapping Tastemakers to Regain Music Mojo". Apple will sell "high-end headphones", under the Beats name. What could go wrong?
... says Mr. Cook has not neglected the company's central mission: innovation. 'Honestly, I don't think anything's changed,' he said."
The authors are WRITERS (Heavenly horn sounds). The first 4 paragraphs are examples of their intent to tell stories like novelists, avoiding writing boring stuff like news. And, of course, WRITERS don't care about messy things like technology, even if they write about technology companies.
It's okay to put in some facts to give novels a feeling of realism: "And the [Apple] stock price fell nearly in half from its 2012 peak to the middle of 2013" Then: "To shore up shareholder faith, Mr. Cook split the stock, increased the dividend and engineered a $90 billion buyback -- steps that helped shares rebound almost entirely." The price of stock goes up when someone buys a lot of it.
But novelists have problems. Sometimes facts are more weird than any novelist would invent: "rap star Dr. Dre
Mr. Cook is not much like Steve Jobs. He supports brand confusion: "Mr. Cook is trying to broaden Apple's brand, too, taking to Twitter and other public venues to express support for environmentalism and gay rights (and for Auburn University football)."
There are big hopes for the Apple iWatch "... according to people involved in the project, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to press." Steve Jobs fired people who announced products early because announcing early creates brand confusion.
The whole point of being a novelist is to avoid unpleasant realities. It's like being a drugee, but without the drugs. Don't get involved with messy issues. Quoting: "Jonathan Ive, the head of design at Apple
Mr. Cook wrote an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal in support of proposed federal legislation protecting gay, lesbian and transgender workers.
Nothing has changed?
Another quote: "Last July, a federal judge ruled that Apple had illegally conspired with publishers to try to raise prices in the e-books market; Apple is appealing."
And this: "Apple has also started building apps for Android systems".
Novelists like to live in their fantasy worlds. They don't want to think about messy news like the beginning of a gay, rap-singing, law-breaking, watch-making Apple that makes software for Google.
The real story? Apple and the New York Times are both spiralling downwards, in my opinion.
most people find those devices OK. your opinion is not meaningful when Apple shares and profits are climbing to the statosphere
Except Apples shares plummeted under cooks leadership it has taken two years to recover some of it most based on market manipulation rather than actual success. Its profits continue to be based on the iphone in the American market...everything else is struggling including the ipad and that peaked two years ago. Apple is seeing shrinking margins and its first shrinking profits under Jobs.
The bottom line is that growth before came from successful launches of products...Cook has yet to show the world anything slashmydots is criticising later iterations of products Jobs launched as *new* markets, and people are buying competitors products more, because they are larger, faster, cheaper, newer, powerful blah blah blah
If you were to say, "Jim Thompson [according to those] who spoke anonymously...,'" it would mean something very different from "Jim Thompson [according to those who spoke anonymously]...." The summary uses the first, which implies this named man spoke anonymously.
Steve Jobs was not creative. At all. Name one thing he ever invented.
Apple. As in the company. It is very much the creative brainchild of Steve Jobs. He founded it, led it, it foundered without him and he rebuilt it. If you think that didn't require immense creativity and invention then I think you don't understand the meaning of the words. Furthermore many of the important details of Apple products have been shown to be directly attributable to Steve Jobs. No, he didn't do it all himself, but then nobody does in business.
Your information is out of date.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/je...
Google has overtaken Apple to become the world’s most valuable global brand in the 2014 BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brand ranking, worth $159 billion, an increase of 40% year on year. After three years at the top, Apple slipped to No 2 on the back of a 20% decline in brand value, to $148 billion, according to annual research conducted by Millward Brown.
Cook is a businessman.
Jobs was a evangelist.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Honestly I'd be happier to see an openly available AppleTV SDK than a watch.
Yesterday I streamed the 24 Hours of Le Mans via my iPod (paid for via an in app purchase) and put it on my TV via AirPlay. If they had an open SDK they likely would have had an Apple TV app which would have worked better than my approach. I had to switch devices/screens to view timing data and replays whereas a native TV app could have provided a much nicer experience.
Besides, think of the games! :)
You don't even know whether there will be a watch.
Except it is already a proven market, with large companies and some great products. I personally would love Apple the parasite and its abuse of patents to stay out of new markets.
It is unlikely to get involved in consoles...low turn over...no profit margins already a premium market. It could make money on *cough* apps, but android is there first and in droves cheaper with a larger ecosystem...and it does not make the same margins from software. The bottom line is Apple can't even right drivers as fast as Linux...they run 15 year old games as a tenth of the speed.
The bottom line is I would love a more powerful AppleTV a product Apple have squandered. At least we have chromecast.
OK, Apple is number 2
Something we can finally agree on, the fact that Apples brand is shrinking and Beats is growing in an Apple area dominates does not really matter. the whole point is Apple is relying on past glories...and those under Jobs.
Honestly I'd be happier to see an openly available AppleTV SDK
Apple have squandered a lead they had with AppleTV when for a few $ you can by a cromecast of android device(even dedicated gaming ones) who cares now. In context of this article I think its cooks biggest failure.
"I am in no sense of the word a great artist, not even a great animator; I have always had men working for me whose skills were greater than my own. I am an idea man."
I didn't really understand your point about watches, something about "bitches" and flipping. Your talk about the nike band...not really a smartwatch really, but http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04... there is talk of collaboration between the two which makes more sense, as they are unlikely to compete in the smartphone market, which is already hitting strides. The moto360 is making waves.
As for switching on games on AppleTV...are those people games buyers or would they have like bought a game console instead of an AppleTV.
As for swift...a proprietary language, other than locking in developers to ios why would anyone care. you can't pull those tricks with a market share of 15% and shrinking however good it is...and the drivers are still slow.
Apple just had it's most impressive WWDC since the launch of the iPhone.
Safari(With Bing?) Mail improvements, More Lock in/Cloud(At a price). Single platform...slight(after slight) at google, costly cloud applications, even with a few tweaks...like a clone of the awesomebar, and a nice payout from Microsoft.
Spin is just that spin. I bought the first iPhone
I'm old enough to remember when Apple stock went up because they made and sold revolutionary new products.
Pro-tip for entrepreneurs: If you spend $90 billion buying your own stock, the stock price will rise. Similarly, if you get very drunk an ugly girl doesn't look quite as bad.
The problem is you can only do that so many times before you can no longer pretend she's a supermodel or you have to go to rehab to prevent your life from falling apart around you.
You are welcome on my lawn.
We know that Jobs wasn't a technologist. Even in his later years you couldn't have possibly called him much of an inventor and certainly not one of the same caliber as Wozniak.
We also know that Jobs was a poor businessman until his later years, and even then, he only learned his lessons the hard way by nearly destroying the company after the early success of the Apple ][ series. He was no Markkula.
What Jobs was, other than an egomaniacal backstabber and chronic credit thief, was a nonpareil marketer. The only thing he promoted better than his products was himself, but that's besides the point - convincing his company and his customers that he was the second coming of digital Jesus (or an Silicon Valley version of the Old Testament God) was just part of doing business and a means of gaining control over his environment, necessary tasks for any executive despite his means of fulfilling them. He understood the concept and power of fashion and how easy it is to reach into that right-brain and some deeper, more reptilian components accompanying it, and cause people to want to buy things regardless of their technological merits. By transforming devices into accessories and attaching status to the Apple brand through trendy design and hip advertising, Jobs was able to create a commercial cult unmatched in recent history, and all of that has to do with a profound understanding of the irrational human mind. (The huge part that rests underneath the iceberg of consciousness, mostly unseen by ourselves.) That man could've sold dog droppings at $1,000 a pound and Apple would still be the richest company in the world. He was just that good, the king of postmodern consumerism.
I can't even be mad at him for how he ran Apple. I'm fascinated by it, actually. Not only is it instructional for future leaders, it's a validation of every critique of the common consumer and a gigantic rebuttal to the idea that agents in a market always behave rationally, when in fact they seldom do. (The greatest force in the marketplace is not reason but a combination of impulse and passion, which are perhaps one and the same.) I condemn how he treated his friends and his family and we all know now that he was a deeply unpleasant, Machiavellian asshole through and through, but if you ignore his character he did everything else right. He played his game astonishingly well and is one of the few people I would actually say 'won' at capitalism. It's a shame he didn't live longer. I would've liked to have seen where he would take the company next and what other schemes he would devise over time.
Speaking of which, he was no medical doctor, either. Too bad for him that he convinced himself he was one. Hubris kills in more ways than one.
so when Google released their 7" tablet in July 2012, I bought one.
Then, in October 2012, Apple did a "me too!" and announced the iPad mini. I still think it was a reactionary move and I doubt the iPad mini would have surfaced at all if someone else hadn't released it first.
Wait, you think the iPad mini was approved, designed, engineered, mass manufactured and released in four months?
Haven't you ever heard of rapid prototyping?
This it's the Apple development cycle here! It's not like anyone expects a finished product out of anything first generation.
So far, the extent of innovation under Tim Cook is one extra row of icons on the iPhone.
Not much compared to Steve Jobs.
>Steve Jobs was not creative. At all. Name one thing he ever invented.
I thought that he came up himself with the idea of the nifty magnetic power cable connector. A very good innovation that must have saved many a Mac laptop when users would step on the cable.
In any case he could see potential and kept on pushing his people further and further until he would say himself "ok, now we have something really cool.". It is that attitude that caused Apple to come with great products. Regarding Cook, he seems a perfectionist as well in a different way. Let's see what they will come up with their watch product before we really judge him. Apple was rarrely about being first to market for example with smartphones or music players, but they tend to do things truly well. Currently there is no smartwatch I would bother wearing. Considering Apple's history, there is a good chance that their approach will be a lot more attractive.
Fresh Hot Videos - http://freshwapi.com
But some say he is less hands-on in developing products than his predecessor.
The best leaders will see their own shortcomings and delegate to trusted experts to pick up their slack. Perhaps this is Cook's strategy.
Jobs famously said that 64K was enough for the Macintosh and the engineers went behind his back and stuck in 128K anyways. Jobs designed a computer that would catch fire because it could not get rid of the heat it created. Jobs did many other insane things which were purely insane and not insanely great.
The best leaders will see their own shortcomings and delegate to trusted experts to pick up their slack. This is the difference between the two.
But the founding and initial success of Apple would not have happened without Wozniak.
The founding and initial success of Apple wouldn't have happened without a lot of people, Woz not the least among them. Any claim however that Jobs was not critical to the success of Apple simply is not looking at the facts. As much as the initial Apple computer hardware was Woz's creation, the company of Apple was Job's creation. Building a company or an organization is every bit the creative engineering feat that building a computer is. It's no disrespect to Wozniak to say that without Jobs none of us would likely have had the chance to recognize Woz's genius. However given the repeated successes Jobs had (Apple, Next (sorta), Pixar, Apple again), it seems more likely we might have heard of Steve Jobs if Apple had never happened. After the initial Apple and Apple ][, Woz never really repeated his success again. He seems to have been the right guy in the right place at the right time.
I think the problem is more that many (most?) people seem to think that being creative and being innovative is the same thing. It isn't.
Steve Jobs may not have been the most creative person on the planet - but he was possibly one of the most innovative.
It's all well and good if you think of an idea on how to beat cancer - but the idea is nothing if you can't realize it.
Maybe Xerox had the first graphical user interface - but they had fairly little idea on what to do with it - Jobs did - and while many people will happily point out that Xerox had a mouse and GUI before Apple got there (and they're right) - how many can honestly say they had heard of a mouse and graphical user interfaces BEFORE they had seen one on an Apple computer or one of the countless GUIs that followed?
How many phones today would have touch screens and controls that look eerily similar to the iPhone ones, if the iPhone wouldn't have shown it before? (it doesn't matter, if you know a single phone before that had a touch screen - physically having the touch screen is not the same as seeing how it was all put together first).
Tablets had been around before the iPad - but what kind of sales did they have before? And what kind of sales do they have now? And - those that are selling the best now, in terms of their usability, do they look a damn sight more like the iPad, or more like whatever tablets were there before?
All those are cases of INNOVATIONs brought by Apple and which ultimately massively changed the face of the markets that they went into.
Another pointer on how Apple did something great and something new?
Name the last Samsung product launched that had a significant number of other players in the industry immediately clamoring to make something similar or "better"? When was the last time LG did? Google? Google possibly did with gmail - but search engines were there before, even large and well known ones.
Jobs was great in seeing something and seeing how it could be made useful far beyond what their original creators might have done.
Firing employees on elevator rides, driving a plateless Benz and parking it in handicapped spots at every opportunity, organizing a massively anti-competitive no-poaching agreement across the entire tech industry, hypocritically accusing competitors of "theft" if they make a competing product, lulztastic attempts at fruit-based cancer treatment.
He's doing a downright shitty job, really. But I'm glad that the cult of personality around Jobs is fading, possibly leading to a long-awaited collapse in the Reality Distortion Field.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Is it me or is there a cult of Steve Jobs? He was brilliant. Nut he did not build Apple alone. 1 brilliant Steve Jobs required a lot of smart engineers. Tim Cook knows that, but no one is worshiping him.
"...like our old cat used to fill my grandfather's shoes each morning..."
Um, sorry...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
and pooing in each one.
No longer is Little Johnny just the nancy nerd artist that the varsity football players make fun of. Now he thinks he's Big Johnny, a Ruby on Rails ninja and web designer guru, all thanks to his MacBook Pro.
And all the snot-nosed, socially retarded, little script kiddies huddled in their Mom's basements pawing their greasy fingers over their creaky little POS plastic shitbox computers somehow don't think they are the "World's Greatest Hax0rs(tm)"?
Yeahrightsure.
No, those kids grew up to be responsible adults with good paying jobs while you grew up to sit around in a Starbucks all day, mooching off of their free wifi and refills trying to show everyone how much of an arteest you think you are.
You are like one of those guys with bad priorities who spends hundreds of dollars on a pair of shoes because you think it will make you a sports star.
No, those kids grew up to be responsible adults with good paying jobs while you grew up to sit around in a Starbucks all day, mooching off of their free wifi and refills trying to show everyone how much of an arteest you think you are.
You are like one of those guys with bad priorities who spends hundreds of dollars on a pair of shoes because you think it will make you a sports star.
LOLWUT?
I've only been in a Starbucks once in my life, and that was because someone I was with wanted to stop there.
And as for shoes, the most expensive pair of shoes I have ever bought was about $135. And I have never paid ov $20 for a pair of "sports" shoes. Doesn't make sense for me. I run the heels over too fast to make that make economic sense.
I have, however, been employed pretty steadily for the past forty years as an embedded engineer and applications developer.
So, what was that, again?
http://linux.slashdot.org/comm...