Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple (2016)
steveblank.com
steveblank.com
The author makes the argument that because Tim Cook does not demo new products, Apple is incapable of innovating, and is just cruising on the goodwill of the brand.
What a crock. Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs, and Apple is most definitely different without Steve. But, under Cook the following has happened: Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod, iPhone X, ARKit, Siri Shortcuts, FaceID, iMac Pro. Everything in that list might not perfectly suit every user, but the argument "Without Steve Apple can't innovate!" totally falls over.
Steve gets a lot of attention for his innate sixth sense for product, his masterful presentations, and more. But, I think this era of Apple proves that he was also great at creating a culture and ecosystem that can perpetuate without his presence.
There might be a quality line below which people would notice and care but once you've passed it, they stop caring. Usually the top concern is looks, in this case it's probably the functionality of the assistant.
But how many successful new product categories did the Jobs Apple produce per decade? One or two at most. I personally didn’t get excited over the Bondi Blue iMac but it was Jobs first success but not a new category. That was the iPod. It took years for a new product after that.
Seems to me that the entire legacy of Jobs at Apple is colored by one launch event: the iPhone, which was probably one of the top 5 best demos in the history of technology. It was a really great presentation in the moment, and of course now we can recognize it as an enormous pivot point in the industry, and arguably in human society. But most Steve Jobs Apple events weren't like that.
The iPod, iPad, and Macbook Air are good examples or products that have had a big impact (and done big sales), but were underwhelming when they launched. I would put the Apple Watch in that category. I think its long-term impact is underappreciated right now.
Yes that mix of products and features all happened during his time as CEO but how innovative are those things that you listed really? Is there a common through line to any of the items in your list that would constitute a product vision?
For instance Apple spent billions on buying Beats. And 4 years later they are pushing Air Pods while Apple Music recommendation engine is abysmal. This strikes me as incoherent the opposite of visionary.
Apple was also years ahead with Siri and a voice interface and yet only trotted out a smart speaker years after someone else innovated. And oddly the Home Pod came out years after Apple decided to discontinue making the Airport. This also seemed incoherent as hey already had a toehold in the networked home with the Airport base station and Airport Express.
And during the period where it seems Amazon was busy developing a voice activated digital assistant Apple was busy making jewelry in the form of a wrist watch.
I would also mention the laptop, which although not new and sexy isn't going away anytime soon and aside from the confusing "touch bar" the Macbook Pro hasn't fundamentally changed in years. Dell and MS have innovated far beyond anything that Apple has done with the laptops it seems.
Amazon's digital assistant does things that Siri is not even trying to do and which can only work if you are willing to invade user privacy in ways that Apple is fundamentally opposed to. These products are not really on the same playing field.
How precisely has Dell "innovated" in fundamental ways in the laptop space? They haven't; that's a baseless claim. Dell still can't make a decent trackpad.
From the Apple product page:
>"HomePod is great at the things you want to know, and do, in your home. From getting the latest weather to sending messages and controlling your smart home accessories,2 Siri makes it easy to multitask with just your voice."[1]
Unless you can tell me you were on the design team for the HomePod, you have just entirely made up the fact that the smart functionality is "decidedly secondary."
>"second, no, HomePod did not come out "years after" Airport was discontinued; it was a few months."
Apple stopped developing the Airport and disbanded the team back in 2016.[2] So yeah that's a couple of years. Selling through on existing stock is not the same as actively developing is it?
>"Third, calling Apple Watch mere "jewelry" is silliness; it's a very impressive product by any standard."
A watch is commonly accepted to be both an accessory and a piece of jewelry. It's amusing that you want to dispute this when this watch has become an incredibly fashionable accessory to have at the moment. And just to put a fine point on it, when Hermès is designing for you, its safe to say that you are in fact producing a fashion accessory.[3]
[1] https://www.apple.com/homepod/
[2] https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/21/apple-reportedly-stops-develo...
"A partnership based on parallel thinking, singular vision, and mutual regard continues with a fresh new expression."
So clearly they had a lot to do with the actual product, substantially more than "zero."
You might also note that the actual face of the watch displays Hermès typeface and logo. I'm guessing you aren't familiar with Hermès because they don't need Apple.
Of the products that you list, ONLY the Apple Watch tries to create a new value proposition. And Apple steadfastly refuses to release specific sales numbers because it is not enough to matter relative to its smartphone market.
As for the rest, when I compare my iPhone X versus my wife's Google Pixel, it is clear which product has more innovation going on, and it isn't the more expensive Apple device. When I compare my iPhone X versus my old iPhone 8, it is clear that it is an improved device, but it isn't a new value proposition.
This is a problem for Apple. And the reason why it is a problem is that in every market it is positioned as a premium product. As long as it is a premium product with a relatively static value proposition, it is just a question of time until competitors deliver a good enough product at a better enough value that people switch. And the switching is going only one way.
Let's make that concrete. Annual iPhone sales hit 231 million in 2015. They dropped slightly and have held steady since. See https://www.statista.com/statistics/276306/global-apple-ipho... for a graphic. As a share of the market, iPhones went from a bit over 20% to under 15%, and show no signs that this will turn around. Again, see https://www.statista.com/statistics/266136/global-market-sha... for a graphic.
So Apple is doing great and probably has quite a few good years ahead. But the long-term trends aren't in its favor.
Suggested replies are right a significant fraction of the time.
The fact that you can go outside of the app store when you want is nice.
Lastpass can integrate more easily with other applications. In the iPhone you have to cut and paste. In Android, it just fills in like it does on my desktop.
The fact that Google is not so aggressive about pursuing in-app purchase revenue makes in-app purchasing better. For example you can purchase a book from audible and start listening, rather than having to switch to a browser, buy it on the web, and then download the already purchased book in the app. Technically that's because Audible doesn't want to pay Apple 30% of their revenue. But as a user it is simply a better experience.
Plus many smaller UI tweaks.
iMac Pro comes after a year or two of widespread criticism after the "can't innovate my ass" trashcan farce. For that money I would want a cheese grater with slots and expansion not an all-in-one that seems fine for regular iMac prices. Airpods are hardly ground breaking. HomePod was joining in because everyone else was. iPhone X is bigger, faster with a notch that speaks of kludge not innovation.
It's not just siri voice support: Shortcuts can now access system functions. And third party apps will integrate into it.
Those aren't transformational changes, they're are incremental changes that Apple is already good at.
A transformational change would be creating high-quality media shipping to Apple TV- a direct competitor to Netflix, fully contained in the Apple ecosystem. Building a content media division is very hard for Apple to do, but would keep them relevant.
Apple is missing the boat on media, which is the probably the biggest battlefield in 2018. Disney, Netflix and Amazon are setting the pace and there's no reason why Apple couldn't compete. Not only compete, but win in that space, with the insane capital and ability to lock into Apple hardware.
Nobody is talking about smartwatches. Everyone is talking about what they're binge-watching. Apples winning the wrong conversations.
In other words Apple is simultaneously building an on phone AI while at the same time retaining it's mission of privacy for the user.
I'll take the little hit on functionality in exchange for a massive upgrade in privacy.
So in the end Tim Cook is carrying on the customer and privacy centric DNA that Jobs imbued into Apple using innovation that other companies just dream about.
It reminded me once again of how what you believe gives color to the narrative you're trying to communicate. More importantly, what the reader believes also colors the narrative and sometimes it wasn't exactly what the author intended.
I resonate strongly with the notion that there are good times and 'late' times to innovate. I also agree strongly that it takes someone who is taking a wider and longer view of the situation to be good a calling the shots on that. But it is also quite important to be able to turn those opportunities into products and learn from that effort to really ride the 'change' (what ever it is) into a leadership and profitable position.
When I read this in 2016 I was not convinced that "AI" was the big innovation it was being hyped to be, however since that time I've come to a different conclusion. While I still think "AI" is hype, I see the ability to use machine learning algorithms to take the digital exhaust of a system and post process it into an algorithm for anticipating the outputs of that process to be quite powerful, and is having an impact on a lot of systems today.
I see the work that Apple has done to improve the efficiency of the A12X SoC, which was announced today, for executing algorithms based on machine learning to be pretty innovative.
In 2016 machine learning was still 'party trick' status as far as I was concerned but here in 2018 it is looking more and more like 'core thing all computer systems will do'.
As a result I'm willing to give Tim Cook more innovator points than Steve Blank was willing to do back in 2016.
(misc: I love how the user handle 'IBM' posted this)
Could you elaborate on that ? What does that mean ?
The operation of the system leaves behind a trail of its activity (some explicit like new comments, some implicit like karma changes). Collectively this data set is the "exhaust" or "wake" (in the sense of a boat wake that shows up when a boat passes by) of the system running.
A machine learning system can process that data set and make predictions about future behavior of the system. People do this all the time to predict things like "when is the best time to post" "what happens when something makes the front page" etc. Internally predictions can be made about vote fraud or spam or what have you.
You can use machine learning in an active feedback mode where its predictive outputs can then be tied to administrative controls to achieve a desired improvement.
Let's say you wanted to remove the 'front page bias' of articles posted at a particular time. If you have a tool for boosting or demoting stories in a fairly fine grained way, and you can deduce the natural tendency of stories based on submission time to reach the front page, you can have your code 'boost' stories that are submitted during "weak" times and 'attenuate' stories that are submitted during "strong" times. The effect on the system is surfacing a wider variety of stories and a better user experience (for readers at least).
At the meta level, this is no different than control system theory with an error amplifier and a summation amplifier tied into a feedback loop. But Machine Learning brings with it the ability to characterize, and base feedback on, variables that aren't really visible to people nor completely independent.
Coding the variables, their interrelationships and their impact on the output is a time consuming and non-economic thing to do, so it isn't done. But with machine learning, the ability to do that analysis algorithmically and just train for the outputs of interest, is quite inexpensive.
Makes it a very powerful hammer in everything from language translation to truck load planning to autonomous driving.
Ballmer was a worst thing that could happen to any company of a Microsoft scale.
Under his guidance Microsoft stock stalled in a trading range for more than a decade, he was always late to any big game and had that "me too!" laggard strategy for the biggest innovations (cloud, search, mobile) thinking he can buy his way ahead to compensate for the lack of vision and boneheadedness.
It was funny watching MSFT stock to suddenly pop up 8-10% at a slightest rumor of Bill Gates returning.
Tim Cook is nothing like that. He may not be Steve Jobs, but he is not screwing AAPL either.
Look at revenue, look at earnings per share. Steady growth for Ballmer across his tenure. He did a good job.
Having said that, my hands are itching to (disclaimer: i am not financial adviser) buy leap puts on TSLA.
The thing with irrationality is that it's hard to predict. The people that make the right bet get hailed as genius visionaries, the losers are simply forgotten. A good CEO is not a gambler, they're consistent and they can execute, but alas that's not good material to dramatize in the media.
Okay, but:
- Microsoft is still irrelevant on mobile
- Azure already was four years old when Nadella took charge
- Windows 10 was not actually well-received
- Microsoft is irrelevant in Augmented Reality and conversational AI, which are already by themselves not that relevant
Microsoft can't be Apple because Microsoft is uncool. It always will be uncool. It can't do the transformation to a fashion brand like Apple.
I'll make another prediction: The days of "revolutionary" consumer products are over. People won't be living in VR/AR, they'll keep watching stuff on their phone/tablets/TVs. There will be more innovation in B2B and Microsoft is actually in a better position here in the long run.
Per AR, I suppose hololens doesn't count? It sure felt like a step in the right direction when I used it.
Honestly, the least cool thing MSFT makes is Sharepoint. They need to just abandon that line of thinking, and think of something else. Compared to the rest of new MSFT, that whole product needs a drastic upgrade, not just the Teams UI. They missed an opportunity in workplace tech when they bought Yammer and Skype and just sat on them. Maybe they'll get another shot.
Reality is already augmented. Need more information than what your bare eyes can see? Pull out your phone. You don't need it overlaid unto your vision. That's a gimmick.
That seems like a stretch of a conclusion. Amazon has been excelling at cutting out the middleman and reducing costs that are unnecessary in an internet-centric age. Alexa feels like an experiment to see if they can make that even simpler, while cashing in on the IoT fad.
Slight nit pick, using underline for emphasis doesn't work well on the web, it just makes it look like a link.
Of course the iPhone will continue to sell well in the short term, but the trillion dollar market cap is a consequence of what Steve jobs was doing ten years ago. If Steve Jobs were alive now, he'd be working on something totally different. We'all never know!
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/09/redesigned-apple-watc...
Antibiotics are indispensable. An EKG on your wrist is a nice-to-have.
Name pretty much any major tech trend that took off during Ballmer's tenure and look at how well Microsoft was able to capitalize on it. (think MP3 players, phones, tablets, search, social, web apps, cloud services, browsers, etc). His stated strategy was 'fast follower' and we saw how well that worked out. Microsoft has become IBM in that they are mostly legacy tech now and virtually no startups use their stuff in a significant way which doesn't bode well for where they'll be when the windows/office gravy train stops rolling.
Their new CEO has been working hard to fix things (they're no longer a complete embarassment with browsers and cloud services, for example) but Ballmer left them in a pretty inexcusable position given the resources he had at his disposal.
I actually think the Cook/Ballmer comparison is apropos as I see a lot of similarities going on. It's not about where the company is today, it's where the company is likely to be 10 years from now.
I don't blame Ballmer for that as much as I blame the board of directors. It's Ballmer's fault that he went on national TV and laughed at the iPhone, but it's the board's fault that Ballmer still had a job when he stepped off the plane from New York.
And Windows users like myself were certainly in better hands under Ballmer than they are under Nadella. I do have to give him credit for that. Episodes like the Vista launch seemed like critical missteps at the time, but in retrospect he could have done a lot worse.
My company does a medical device with Windows and since the release of Windows 10 we feel very unwelcome on Windows 10. Their release cycle and licensing really sucks so to me Windows is done as a platform for custom applications.