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Apple CEO Tim Cook: 'I've Only Had Good Years' (businessinsider.com)
Business Insider: Under CEO Tim Cook's watch, Apple has sold hundreds of millions of iPhones, booked hundreds of billions of dollars in profit, and launched new products like AirPods and Apple Watch. In fact, Cook says, he's never had a bad year as CEO of Apple. "I've only had good years. No, seriously," he said in an interview with Fast Company. "Even when we were idling from a revenue point of view -- it was like $6 billion every year -- those were some incredibly good years because you could begin to feel the pipeline getting better, and you could see it internally. Externally, people couldn't see that," he continued.
...a good product is one that sells...
The rumblings about iPhoneX are getting stronger...
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Samsung to slash OLED panel output as iPhone X slumps
https://asia.nikkei.com/Busine...
..."Samsung Display now plans to manufacture organic light-emitting diode panels for 20 million or fewer iPhones at the South Chungcheong site in the January-March quarter. The initial goal was to supply panels for 45 million to 50 million iPhones," the FT owner's Asian biz news service reports....
Full overview here.
Apple was founded by a product manager, Microsoft by an Engineer. Engineer's think features are cool. Product managers are more focused on all of it just working together seamlessly even if has far fewer features. Apple has never innovated and been the lead on any technology. It has always been the fast copier and copied other people's innovations, simplified them, rounded the edges and come out with a product which "just works".
For Apple's model to work there need to be other companies in the market doing the innovation. With the iPhone becoming a monster and capturing 90% of the profits in the smartphone market there is not much money left on the table for other companies to innovate so I do not expect any great advancements in the smartphone market.
However there are other markets like voice assistants, AI, Cars etc where Apple can take the innovations of Engineer led companies like Google, Amazon, Tesla and repackage them as iProducts which "just work". Thats where Apple's growth will come from.
**Life is too short to be serious**
... until he didn't.
Like Cook, John Sculley was handed a pipeline of innovation. Sculley was a business manager, like Cook, and was successful in reducing some of Apples destructive excesses. However, besides his childlike fascination with the Newton, he didn't really have any kind of vision for the company and it was inevitable that Apple would hit a wall, because direct competition with Microsoft was suicide (as Apple would soon learn).
Sculley's greatest weakness, in my opinion, was that he didn't have the courage of his own convictions, and let a few inner-circle trusted managers whisper into his ear (*cough* Jean-Louis Gassee).
I have no idea if Cook is taking direction from anyone, but he seems focused on his strength, supply chain management. This will continue to increase or maintain Apple's profits while it coasts. It will work great, until it doesn't.
Apple may have yet another reckoning in the somewhat near future. The way they are focusing like a laser on iPhone and seemingly forgetting they have a really profitable Mac business will be their undoing in my opinion. Just look at how much the quality of Apple's system and some of its application software has declined over the last few years. It used to "just work" and now is finicky, bloated, and cumbersome. It is difficult to make the argument that MacOS is miles ahead of Windows, which you could do for years.
We shall see.