Tim Cook Is Running Apple, but Not Imitating Steve Jobs | Hacker News Reader

Tim Cook Is Running Apple, but Not Imitating Steve Jobs

nytimes.com

122 pointsssclafani55 comments

This quote, IMO, is telling:

"While Mr. Jobs obsesses over every last detail of Apple’s products, Mr. Cook obsesses over the less glamorous minutiae of Apple’s operations."

That is why I agree with Bob Cringley that Cook won't be Apple's next CEO. I think having somebody who doesn't obsess about the products is the wrong thing at Apple. You can have a COO obsess about running the details.

CEOs of large corporations rarely have anything to do with the details of product development. Steve Jobs may have the title of CEO at Apple, but that's not really what he does. In reality, Tim Cook has already been performing most of the typical tasks of a CEO.

I doubt Apple is looking for the next Steve Jobs. They already have a winning team. Tim Cook (COO) and Peter Oppenheimer (CFO) are great at talking with investors and analysts. Phil Schiller (VP Product Marketing) is great at introducing new products to the public. These are people we know, they were put in those positions by Jobs himself. They've all held those jobs since Apple's Dark Ages (the late 90s), and they were just as responsible for Apple's recovery as Steve Jobs was.

Doesn't Jobs often have his name included on patent filings by Apple? That would indicate to me that he's pretty involved in product development.

The OP doesn't say he isn't.

Right, that's why I said he's mostly a CEO in title. Inventing new technology isn't typically part of the job description of a CEO at a major corporation.

Misread you. Sorry. :)

Sounds more like that's a problem with the typical behaviors of CEO's.

Louis IV of France would make a minor change in every play Moliere wrote under his patronage and add himself as an author.

Jobs probably does at least some product development. However, having a single "auteur director" type heightens the image of Apple products as true masterworks, so Apple spends a lot of time focusing on Jobs' larger-than-life genius image.

They've all held those jobs since Apple's Dark Ages (the late 90s)

Oppenheimer was brought in after the backdating scandal, when Fred Anderson was let go. Anderson actually had a big role in saving Apple under Gil Amelio, since he helped arrange a large bond issue which kept Apple from literally running out of money:

The paper also suggested selling convertible debentures, a type of bond, for around $500 million. To help the plan along, Amelio hired Fred Anderson as the new CFO to replace Graziano.

...

Amelio started working with Fred Anderson on preparing Apple's debenture sale. They were working an impossible schedule. Mike Townsend predicted that Apple would be insolvent by April. That left only two months for the sale.

Typically a company's senior executive would travel around the country making presentations to possible buyers for about three weeks and then set a deadline for buying about a month after the last presentation. Not only did Amelio not have that kind of time (if Townsend's predictions were true), he would not be able to leave the company for that long right after he joined it.

http://lowendmac.com/orchard/05/gil-amelio-apple.html

True, Oppenheimer became CFO of Apple in 2004, replacing Fred Anderson. But he's been with Apple since 1996, when he came on as controller for the Americas. In 1997 he was promoted to vice president and Worldwide Sales controller and then to corporate controller.

Of course, this may well be why Apple has done so well the last ten or so years. Perhaps CEOs should be more involved in product development, and it would be an error for Apple to go back to doing what everyone else does...

Most people seem to be in complete denial.

No one else could have done what Jobs did with Apple in the past 10 years. No one else will be able to do it in the next 10 years.

Replacing one multi-talented genius with five talented geniuses does not produce the same result.

I mostly agree with you, though you should be also opened to the possibility that not even Jobs would be able to do with Apple in the next 10 years what He did in the past 10 years.

And not only that, I feel like it should be accepted that Jobs was able to really accomplish things at the level at which he did _because_ of the others helping behind the scenes.

No one else could have done what Jobs did with Apple in the past 10 years. No one else will be able to do it in the next 10 years.

That's really not clear. If only we knew this for sure we could make a lot of money on Apple stock options.

You could also write that "if only we knew..." because were it common knowledge it would of course be priced in already.

I have to say I'm kinda surprised that no one has mentioned Jony Ive as a potential successor. Successive keynotes have given me the impression that Jobs trusts Ive and Ive seems to have a similar obsession for making beautiful things. I even remember Jobs referring to Ive as one his best friends.

Jony Ive and Tim Cook in my mind will form a very potent team.

I think you're right on. Ive and Jobs share a similar background (in design, if you consider the calligraphy story) and Ive's personality has been really ingrained in the latest Apple creations. Besides, Apple has already all the structure in place to handle a CEO with less business/operations experience and more focused on products. If Eric isn't coming to Apple (and to me, he is more needed at Microsoft anyway), Ive would make a great CEO.

Design =/= Product. I doubt Ive had the foresight Jobs had when he foresaw the PC as the hub and had the guts to admit MS won the war and not chase after a losing battle. Not only that, Ive had never proven to lead. AAPL will tank if he's made the successor instead of Cook or someone else who's more proven.

It's a real disservice to Ive's career to equate it with someone sitting in on a calligraphy class.

Steve did much more than just sitting on a calligraphy class, from the moulded plastic design used in the Apple II through to significant inputs in the original Macintosh. All that happened much before Ive was at Apple, though I agree that Steve does not have the same formal background in design as Ive.

>If Eric isn't coming to Apple

People keep saying this, but Eric isn't remotely as talented as Jobs. I can't imagine they've given a seconds consideration as having him in the top spot.

Not sure about Cook's ambitions. If he's been eying for the CEO title and he's not made the successor, he can be easily lured away. Ive on the other hand, I would imagine he's happy where he is now. Ive designed devices are probably getting close to a 1/4 to a billion units sold. I'm not sure if he can have that kind of influence anywhere else, nor his desire to be a CEO. Jobs has to know these points. So unless Ive is more ambitious than Cook, making Ive the CEO won't be playing the cards right.

Ive's Apple's best designer. His talent would be wasted at the CEO position.

Apple is not a hardware company, it's a software company that happens to make software

Isn't Woz still on the Payroll? He is the only one remotely close to being as iconic as Jobs. I would love to see Apple go more in the hacker-friendly direction that Woz would take it in.

I can so see it coming out of leftfield like that too, boom, meet the new CEO, Woz!

Fingers crossed.

When Thomas Edison passed, innovation did not come to a halt. Steve Jobs may well recover from his illness, I certainly hope he does, but nevertheless like the rest of us he is not immortal. At some point in the future, and maybe it's even happening now but we don't realize it yet, another innovative genius will come along and change the world. Maybe not at Apple, but somewhere. This is pretty much a guarantee.

Apple will be fine. My heart goes out to Steve & his family.

Given Jobs' medical history and the high profile of AAPL, I'm really, really surprised that the company has not telegraphed a management succession plan.

Given their history of secrecy, I'm not surprised in the slightest.

They probably have, but like most things in Apple, it's kept "secret". One of the funds request that Apple provide such succession plan. The board says such plan made public would allow companies to try and recruit the successor.

I think this was the smartest way possible to phase out Steve Jobs without it impacting the AAPL stock too much. Last time he took a leave of absence, he announced that he'd be back in six months -- this time, he didn't mention a date at all. That seems like a clear sign to me.

I predict that Jobs won't come back to work but he will continue to offer advice and perhaps aide in negotiations with operators, media companies and the like. Then, after about a year or so, people having realized that the company does fine without Jobs, it'd be safe for Jobs to relinquish his position as CEO to Tim Cook. Jobs can then simply stay on as advisor.

Well called. I think this exercise is going to be vital to prove to the shareholders that Apple will be different without Jobs, but be just fine.

Either that or it might simply be that Steve knew when he would return last time and doesn't this time. Besides that, I doubt that Jobs will completely step down from the helm of Apple until he absolutely has to. I'd imagine he will stay on as Chairman and CEO, but make Cook president and COO so he can take on more of the day-to-day responsibility.

Keep one eye on Steve's participation on the BoD at Disney. If that drops off, that could be an indicator as well.

I'm guessing that the next CEO will be an iCEO just like Jobs was, untill they have a few runs on the board.

Publicly announced succession plans give you no upside and lots of downside. Just ask Brett Favre and Jay Leno.

Institutional investors love predictability. But the company needs to be nimble and avoid making unnecessary commitments.

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The way a product cycle works at Apple is that first Jobs comes up with an idea (or approves a one, doesn't matter), designers draw it, engineers build it and Cook is responsible for the supply-side (he optimizes the production to keep the costs minimal and supply stable).

Now if we were to take Jobs out of the cycle, the designers would still have the ideas and engineers could build them. This is great and I'm sure they could still come up with excellent products like a new macbook pro with improved battery life. Jobs is responsible for the vision (direction of the company), if it weren't for him nobody would have dared to invest such vast amounts of resources and time into building something like an iPad.

It's in my opinion that Cook can do excellent work in the short-term making the company grow on paper by optimizing the supply side, but in the long-term he lacks the vision to conquer new fronts.

Do you work at Apple? I'm curious how you have this intimate knowledge of the dynamic there.

Man those Samsung ads were obnoxious, any time I got remotely close to them they kept triggering. And clicking the close "x" took me to their desired website. Frustrating.

Try uninstalling Adobe Flash. Works great here.

Or you could just use AdBlock.

Or ClickToFlash.

When you use ClickToFlash, it still loads the Flash objects, it simply doesn't show them until you tell it to. To the websites you visit, you're still a visitor who has Flash installed.

I want websites to know that I don't want to view Flash content, that's why I go without the Flash plugin altogether.

It still says you have Flash installed to JavaScript and the like. It doesn't load the flash objects.

I use FlashBlock, and block all Flash by default. Then I just override it for Flash elements I actually want to see. That, and, I do a lot of browsing on iPad now...

>Try uninstalling Adobe Flash.

That's like knocking out your teeth because you don't like biting your tongue. Many, many great websites use flash. In fact it's the most interactive ones, ones like kongregate.com that require it. Not only that, but if your browser is detectable as not having flash installed, some sites will just serve ads through another vector such as javascript.

Try an ad-blocking plug-in.

Interesting tidbit on the politics of succession: "As Mr. Cook delivered results, he earned more respect from Mr. Jobs. More important, because he was focused on areas that Mr. Jobs knew little about, he rarely butted heads with him, former Apple executives said."

Try:

http://news.google.ca/news/search?as_q=Tim+Cook&as_nsrc=...

for the link "The Understudy..."

From the 90’s, Steve Jobs has done a lot of good things for Apple. He plans and thinks through everything he does. I don’t think it’s likely that he hasn’t thought of a plan for Apple for when he’s gone.

For those that hit the NYtimes ridiculous pay-wall, this login is available:

username: jack@splat.com password: fthis

I got it from bugmenot.

It's not a pay wall if the registration is free...

an aside firstly, new york times is horrible for forcing you to register to read articles!

though jobs is great at delivering marketing launches and making sure things get done the right way, jonathan ives was strongly behind the soft and hard interface designs of most of the past few years' apple gear, this will not change anytime soon.

what probably changes are the wwdc's and product launches, they won't be as cool, but who cares, you'll still buy product.

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