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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.
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.
Hey AC, don't worry, I'm not an Apple fanboi to any extent. I think Jobs was an asshole in many respects, a profiteering, egotistical glutton that couldn't ever get enough power under his belt. I think that had a lot to do with why he got cancer (stress). I don't even own any iDevices. I think the app store is inherently evil in how they regulate apps (think VLC, anything with F/OSS code in it). I could go on.
But you can't deny that Jobs *was* a creative genius. I bet you could count the number of people that could run such a huge corporation *and* stay true to the right-brain roots that built it on one hand.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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.
Let's see where to start?
1. If iOS 7 was so bad, why was the adoption rate so high so fast?
2. The iPad 3 did suck. All indications are that the A6 and the lightening connector just weren't ready in time. They bought out a new iPad six months later.
3. ITunes has been a disaster since it started trying to manage iOS devices.
4. Everyone is suing Apple because that's where the money is. Who isn't getting sued left and right these days?
5. IOS 8 is a "disaster"? You mean the OS that isn't even shipping yet?
6. The iPad Mini 3 a lie? Huh?
Steve Jobs was not creative. At all. Name one thing he ever invented.
"Holding it wrong"
Steve Jobs was not creative. At all. Name one thing he ever invented.
Typical engineering mindset - "inventions" are not the only yardstick of creativity. Pablo Picasso never invented anything either, but I hope you're not going to argue that he wasn't creative.
Jobs demonstrated a highly creative approach to business, acting intuitively and often flouting the rules of "what businesses should do." He transformed Pixar from a software company to an entertainment company. He change Apple from an also-ran PC manufacturer into a provider of an ecosystem of mobile and desktop devices with seamless software, entertainment and marketplace integration. He imagined what customers would want and took the gamble of building it, and had no fear of cannibalizing his existing products to do so. And, in the world of business, that is creativity.
"95% of all Slashdot
Maybe Apple could make a comeback under Scott McNealy, former head of SUN Microsystems.
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.
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.
He had taste. That, combined with bring sociopathic, was the secret of his success.
Picasso is created Cubism w/arguable amounts of co-credit to Braque, and Wikipedia says he invented constructed sculpture and co-invented collage. You might want to research someone before you use them as an example.
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.
I used to think taste was kind of like fashion, but I've realized it's more.
Specifically, a few years ago I listened to Ira Glass's short talk on storytelling and there's this short bit about taste that is just SO wise and SO insightful... (view all four parts)
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
What I think Steve Jobs did was get an organization to do this, to make tasteful things. He was a great integrator. He pulled people together, he pushed through obstacles, he overcome a lot of mediocrity. Yeah, he was a jerk about a lot of things.
It's like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that's written or anything that's created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity. It's all tending toward mediocrity in the same way that all atoms are sort of dissipating out toward the expanse of the universe. Everything wants to be mediocre, so what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such a fucking act of will.
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.