Former Apple engineer: Tim Cook made Apple a 'boring operations company'

I don't get why people are so surprised that this is the Apple we're seeing under Tim. Tim was the COO... he knows operations. He's not a creative, he's not a tech guy. He knows operations, and he knows them well.

While the creative/user facing side has been lack luster (depending on if you ask the average consumer or a techie), the operational side is booming. Their product line has slimmed, they have clear and concise build processes, they've improved their services roll out and are still sitting on a mound of cash.

I think Tim has accomplished what he was put in place to do. People act like Steve Jobs, the guy who put Tim there, didn't know Tim at all. Jobs knew Tim very well. He knew what Tim was good at, and I'm sure they talked about what Tim should do in the future. This is the established course for Apple. Take it or leave it.

Nobody can be bothered to quote the most important part of the article?

> "At Apple in 2007, organizationally it was the wild west," Burrough said. "I was hired under a particular manager, but for the first two years worked on projects that had virtually nothing to do with that manager's core responsibility. That's because the organization wasn't the priority, the projects were the priority. It was the exact opposite of 'not my job.' It was 'I'm here to solve whatever problems I can, irrespective of my role, my title, or to whom I report.' It was wild. But it was also very rewarding, because everything you did had maximal impact on the product." > > But today, the "dynamic has clearly and distinctly changed," and Apple is much closer to his job at Palm, said Burrough, who most recently founded a 3D printing company called Bilt It. > > "Working at Palm, the teams were highly organizational, [hierarchical] and responsibilities were siloed," Burrough said. "There was a clear sense that each person had a clear responsibility, and rarely deviated from it. When you went to someone for help solving a problem 'not my job' was a common response."

Is this something for startups to be worried about, introducing hierarchy and silo'ing and a culture of "not my job" especially as they grow rapidly?

Clicking through to the original tweetstorm [0] is recommended; it goes into more depth, and there are some continuing showers at this time.

It jibes with this page that I found striking, from a book of interviews with ex-Apple executives: http://i.imgur.com/dGmHcqv.png

[0]: https://twitter.com/bob_burrough/status/821085627084984320

Before we all speculate about this ourselves, can we take a second and ask who this former Apple engineer is and what makes him an authority? There are thousands of engineers at Apple.

This was by design, in that Jobs intentionally chose Cook because he wanted someone that could keep Apple running well and stable during the iPhone boom. It was obvious a few years into the life of the iPhone, that it was going to be a monster product and generate immense profit (although I seriously doubt many expected $40b in annual profit). Jobs didn't believe Apple needed another product guy to come in so soon and tamper with that setup. Cook's job was almost solely to shepherd the iPhone and the supply chain through its growth phase. The guy that comes after Cook, will have to be the next product guy and in theory he'll have immense resources to work with.

I'll believe it. But on the other hand, I remember when iCloud was an incredibly unreliable service, when iMessage went down... Apple needed to improve its operations. Preferably not at the expense of being an interesting company, though.

Apple is sitting on so much cash. I never understood why they couldn't throw a couple BILLION dollars at a long term project to eliminate bugs from its software. Instead they have had tons of regressions with almost every major release. This hurts their bottom line and reputation.

Apple developed Swift and GCD, they could have pioneered new levels of reliability and revived Dijkstra's focus on provably correct practices. They could have gotten their reputation for "it just works" back and then some. Why don't they? Do they care anymore?

Other areas:

* Network and social. Why not get this right? Ping was their best attempt, seriously?

* Voice. They let others own this space after buying Siri? Why? You are rolling out interfaces for cars and homes and you don't care about people associating you with "smart and natural interfaces"? What happened to the Mac standing out for being easy to interact with?

Instead they invest it in some shadowy fund that makes safe investments. At least use 1% of your money on this every year you guys! What is wrong with you? Haven't you learned from every other company that has stopped innovating along the lines of what they were known for?

I think that Apple's lack of structure is why their software and services were largely lacking under Steve Jobs. Maybe there is a way to have your cake and eat it too. IDK, something like Apple Pay under Steve Jobs probably would've had a messy rollout.

Software and services require stability and predictability. Tim Cook is the yang to Steve Jobs' ying. I think TC is looking for the optimal balance.

I don't think an ops ceo dooms a company to be boring. More important is how good the ops ceo is at recognizing the importance of innovation/ vision and clearing a path for that to happen.

That video seems to be saying VR is the future. I'm not so sure about that.

I am frustrated with some of Apple's web services. iCloud is better than it used to be but I find Siri to be inferior to Google Now.

That said, I love my MacBook and iPad Pro devices. Also, it is easy enough to use the Google app on iPhones (which I don't have) and iPads.

For consumers, I think the MacBook is a good direction to go: excellent battery life and screen, and compact form factor. I use a 16 core, 60GB ram VPS for development so the MacBook being a little weak in the CPU department is fine with me.

So, I think Apple is going in a good direction, but I would like them to ramp up investment in web services.

I think Apple under Cook will have the same fate as Microsoft under Ballmer.

Maybe that's just the reality distortion field wearing off. I think a large impact Steve had at Apple keynotes has gone missing. The product managers just can't replicate his RDF

Whats the over/under on Scott Forestall coming back in a Job-ish way to help "win" back mindshare?

The iPhone bridged an enormous gap putting the world in everyone's pocket.

What gaps are left?

All these comments about innovation vs lack thereof, and no mention of Jonny Ive?

Because the little jails they made under Steve Jobs were "exciting"!

https://stallman.org/apple.html

>>> "There was a clear sense that each person had a clear responsibility, and rarely deviated from it. When you went to someone for help solving a problem 'not my job' was a common response."

Yikes. Perhaps that explains some of the software quality lately.