He knows he's never going to match that legend... so why try? Instead of fighting it, he uses it to foster a common purpose within the company.
In terms of "maintaining" the business, Apple's share price when Cook became CEO seven years ago was about a quarter of what it is now. Pretty good maintenance.
I posited that Steve probably wasn’t the right person to grow Apple to $1T in market cap and that Tim really made it happen. My friend took the opposite side believing that Tim is just running of Steve’s ideas and that Tim had relatively little to do with making it happen.
Curious to see what HN thinks.
This is an interesting topic for me as I find myself asking similar questions about my role at a company I founded.
I founded a company currently valued in the low-mid 8 digits. I successfully brought the company through an acquisition and have doubled revenues since.
I keep coming back to an article I read on HN years ago talking about the 4 types of CEOs: founder, growth, maintenance, death (bankruptcy). While I’ve found success in 1 and 2, I don’t enjoy 2 as much as 1 and I don’t think I’d be any good at 3 or 4.
I’m probably experiencing a form of imposter syndrome as the board & leadership are all satisfied with my performance, but the thoughts still linger.
I think Steve Jobs was an incredibly talented person and it's not really fair to ding Tim Cook for not being Steve Jobs. Apple is obviously not the same company without Jobs, but is that Tim Cook's fault? I don't see how.
It seems to me that a lot of the "analysis" of Tim Cook vs Steve Jobs is really just people wishing Steve Jobs was still alive. I wish he was too.
I will point out that Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and hired Tim Cook in 1998. So Jobs' incredible 2nd run at Apple was also, to some extent, Cook's incredible run too.
He told me that Steve was his friend, and he believes that no true friend can ever be/replace their friend, so he chose to run Apple like Tim.
From his emphasis on privacy to his masterful supply chain management, it is clear that he has stuck to that position.
Posthumous reality distortion field in effect. Can you feel it?
In 100 years when people hear Disney they will think about Walt Disney.
Why? Because it literally is "The Walt Disney Company".
https://www.nyse.com/quote/XNYS:DIS
Will they think of Jobs or Gates when they hear of Microsoft or Apple? It's far from certain.
How many CEO's from 100 years ago can you name that did not have their name in the company's name?
I'm not sure how many CEOs from 100 years ago I can name, period. Most companies that old do seem to include a person's name. But I'd say Steve Jobs stands at least as likely to be remembered as Ray Kroc or Thomas Watson, and for many of the same reasons.
This is an unbelievably tone deaf thing to say and a reason why people roll their eyes when techies talk about the future.
For a good example of how this type of rhetoric fails to persuade people, look for criticism of Steven Pinker. I'm not trying to discard his work so much as to point out that the values he takes for granted as being desirable are not universal.
EDIT: for backup to my "widely held" claim, here's a poll on what people think has improved life the most in the last 50 years, as well as what they expect to improve it the most in the future. Technology and medicine / health (which is technology-related, of course) hold the top two spots in both results: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/12/four-in-ten-...
Also, just by way of info, Africa is now one of the world's fastest growing economic regions, thanks to capitalism: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/middle-east-and-a....
I genuinely don't get it. We just watched Asia lift literally billions of people out of abject poverty through capitalism, and now that Africa is on track to do the same, people are full of criticism. Unreal.
In any case, there are more things to measure with effects of technology than poverty, which is far from an objective measure and implies many things about the values of the person measuring it. You need to compare and contrast multiple views of the world to meaningfully conclude one is better. Steven Pinker has only made a readable argument for one perspective. Merely accepting that argument will not necessarily provide you with a better model. This viewpoint is inevaluable by itself; a pleasant bit of secular faith.
Anyway, it’s tone deaf because children are also mining our computer components, working in effectively slave labor factories, recycling our technology at great cost to their communities, likely because the power dynamics between nations are so skewed to wealth. This “progress” is paid for in the blood of children.... so, by producing such a simple view of the universe, you are implying your values and marginal life improvement completely justify the pain people go through producing your phone, sneakers, tv, all of which are designed to rapidly deteriorate and continue the cycle.