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"Steve Jobs was huge on vision but he really sucked operationally, because of that Tim Cook was the 'go to' guy who ran day to day operations. You need that blend in a company, good manager, good vision. "

Who is supplying the vision at Apple now? Ives?

"When Microsoft had Bill Gates as the 'vision' guy and Ballmer as the 'execution' guy it worked well."

If the vision + operations hypothesis is true, doesn't it mean that Apple is now starting the same journey that MS did when they lost Gates? The ops guy is in charge, without a counter balancing visionary.

"Who is supplying the vision at Apple now? Ives?"

That sir, is the $64B question. Many people has suggested that without a replacement for Steve's vision, that Apple will be just as likely to end up like Microsoft today, executing against the last known 'good' plan. Sadly it will take a while before "we" (the folks outside of Apple) know whether or not they have developed new talent or leadership to replace Steve.

Steve Jobs originally conceived of the interface of the iPhone as a device that used the clickwheel from the iPod. And Steve Jobs did not come up with the clickwheel, when the iPod was conceived.

One of Steve's biggest mistakes at Apple was probably that he had a really bad habit of taking credit for other people's ideas and subsuming all promotional achievements under the aegis of "Apple" - which inevitably pointed to Steve Jobs.

At the latest All Things D, Cook emphasized how Steve's great feat was to change his mind at any time - which implies that he didn't always come up with the solutions or, dare I say, the ideas. You could argue that he was great at making decisions and keeping focus, but I think there is still at lot of talent and vision to go around at Apple.

I would not be surprised to learn that all of these things you say are true. But you miss what Steve Jobs did, he made them happen. Which is to say that he may have been claiming credit left and right but he looked (from the outside) to be fearless in his drive to get the next product done and shipping. A really fascinating story in WSJ today about Nokia and their smart phone dreams in 2007 [1]. Which if you read the article has this quote:

"If only they had been landed in products," Mr. Elop said of the company's inventions in a recent interview, "I think Nokia would have been in a different place."

And that is so key. To go to production requires a crap ton of work, there are manuals, there are repair strategies, there are warranty kits, there are certifications and approvals, there is testing and injection molding tooling. The list seems nearly endless. Then once you ship the product (unless you're HP apparently :-) you commit to supporting it for 2, 3 even 5 years. That is a Big Deal(tm) and so making that commitment requires Big Decisions.

Now when you are small its easy, you have to ship product to survive and you don't care that you're committing to 5 years of long term support if you're just happy if you still exist in five years. But if you're a big name and a big company you see that investment meaning you can't invest in something else. And if you don't passionately and honestly believe that what is being proposed is or can be the next big thing, you don't dare ship it and miss the real big thing.

Clayton did a much better job than I at describing the Innovator's Dilemma but the essence of what he speaks about is the will to ship. Steve had that in spades and its a rare gift. It can work against you too (see Adam Osborne who announced but shipped late the Osborne Executive as the HBR exemplar of killing yourself).

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230438800457753...

what Steve Jobs did, he made them happen.

In light of what came out in the authorized biography, it's sounding like that might not have been the case after all. It's not just that Jobs didn't come up with all the best ideas to come out of Apple over the past decade. It's that, all too often, he was fighting them tooth and nail, and other powerful (if lesser-known) figures at Apple managed to push them through despite.

The implication is that while it might have looked like all great ideas came from one man, that was just part of the carefully-managed public image and the real machine driving it all is a whole lot of creative tension.

"It's that, all too often, he was fighting them tooth and nail, and other ... figures at Apple managed to push them through despite."

Pushing ideas hard is part of the job

And he may have fought tooth and nail, but in the end he made the right call.

Because in the end that happens all the time, but the crap idea wins.

I don't mean to argue a black to the Jobs fans' white; as long as the discussion is nuanced, I am perfectly satisfied. Just compare the org chart of Apple to that of Microsoft to see how much they differ.

Cook's job is still hugely significant, but it's too Hacker News-like to reduce everything to a catchy one-liner or word meant to suggest that Apple is in dire straits, when it's more complicated than that.

Don't disagree at all. There is a proverb says that "The constraints of the horn determine its music." This is true for company organizations as well, how a company is organized determines what it can and cannot do. When we moved to the SF Bay Area my wife worked for Xerox and saw that every day. At Sun Microsystems, when the 'portable' launched, we joked "You can make any kind of computer you want as long as its a workstation!"

Microsoft's vision guy, in 2006, was Ray Ozzie. He even took over Bill Gates' old Job Title. He left in 2010.

Too bad Ray Ozzie couldn't see an elephant if it was painted purple and dancing in front of him

Talk about the biggest corporate fumbler in history.

Of course, he was the "Lotus Notes" man

This. Microsoft has always executed its fully-baked plans very well, and credit should go where it's due there.

The problem is with a lack of a fully-baked overall vision. And the problem is even more so with the combination of undignified heel-nipping and desperate clinging to a zombie vision from the 1990s (most recently re-branded as "Windows Everywhere") that is being allowed to serve as a substitute for a real vision.

More fundamental than that: I think the issue is poor performance management and the well-connected tenured employees that can't break free from decades-old paradigms.

Not having the CEO be the vision person in a highly politicized environment like MS means there will never be a vision person. Good "vision people" (are they smoking peyote or something? ;) don't like to put up with that kind of crap that shackles their ability to make change.

That is the trust thing. Lets say Ballmer anoints Mundie or someone else to 'fix' the overall vision thing. That person then sets down a plan for moving the company forward and if it means that the Office guys have to so suck their thumbs because it won't help their product then so be it.

What happens in these situations is that the powerful subgroup does its sort of machination move and tries to ambush the guy in some meeting or email or something. At that point Ballmer has to basically shoot the ambushers and allow the vision guy to exit untouched with this plan in place, up to and including firing someone on the ambush team. That is how you send the message through the highly politicized environment, you shoot people who try to put roadblocks in front of "your guy" (or gal). It works really well.

However, and its a real problem, Ballmer has to realize he has to do this, he has to get the vision guy on board or promoted, and then he's going to have to shoot some of the political party leaders publicly in order to get the others to fall in line. Now if he can't do that, then he's missing an important skill as CEO.

This seems to have already happened, the future of Microsoft is Steven Sinofsky. (Well, barring Windows 8 being a Vista-esque disaster...)

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-02-28/tech/31106885...