The Job After Steve Jobs: Tim Cook and Apple
m.us.wsj.com
m.us.wsj.com
Cook has been running the company since the late '90s. I'd say he's a pretty well-known by now. Ruthlessly competent operations chief, who saved Apple from operational incompetence (by the "Adult Supervision" who fired Jobs in the first place), and probably the biggest reason why the iPod, iPhone, and iPad are successes - by giving Apple the capability to design (through operating capital), market and produce them, and make a margin on every unit they sell.
Apple being a black box due to secrecy, it's hard to tell what's going on inside, but by all we have seen, it's been pretty confident at doing what it feels it's good at. I doubt there's a "Jobs haunting" mentality there. But hey, if Yukari Kane wants to sell books...
What we know for certain is that Apple can still _execute_ very well and stay competitive in a certain market. The latest offerings of Macs, iPhones and iPads are ample proof of that.
The question which is still unanswered is whether Apple, with Tim Cook and the other leaders, has what it takes to stay innovative. It's too early to tell, and I think it's certainly to early to write a book about it.
Since Tim Cook has gone on record saying that we will wee new product categories within the year, my guess is that we'll know for certain in 2-3 years time.
Innovation has came before Jobs, and it will come after jobs. One man alone does not hold lock and key to something as big as innovation.
If Apple is the only company that can put a screen in 7 billion people's hands and home, how is this not a testament to greatness?
Don't be the next Steve Jobs. Be Tim Cook. Be you.
I think this fits with your larger point however: Ballmer was not a product visionary.
Every leader has their share of Missteps, and Cook has had his.
Forstall, from everything I've heard about him on The Talk Show, and on ATP.FM, was very Jobs like in his high expectations for people, his ability to drive creations through his singular focus. What he wasn't, was collaborative. This was okay in the Jobs era, when collaboration wasn't really needed - everything was an extension of Job's desires (which also meant that those things that were not, tended to be neglected - mobileme).
Perhaps, after reflection, I don't know if I would call Forstall a Cook Problem, so much as a resource that could no longer be effectively harnessed in the Cook Era. Or, perhaps, he was the DRI (Directly Responsible Individual), who had to take the responsibility for the Maps V1 cruddy roll out.
Okay, why in the world are we, supposed 21st century intellectuals, supposed to be looking at a leader who asks for quantification and hard data as somehow unusual and harsh? If I assume that the writer knows his audience well, implications of this for how WSJ readers generally think is, frankly, breathtaking.
We don't live in the world wishfully imagined by the Romantic Era! We live in a world ruled by mathematically-based laws best understood from first principles. The "Rule of Cool" is not going to suspend the laws of physics and economics for you just because you greatly impress a bunch of bipedal primates on a particular planet. < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV3sBlRgzTI >
This is especially true for startups! However many of us fail to comprehend this because we forget that human beings are not omniscient. Just because we don't yet understand how market forces are going to respond to an entirely new product category or an entirely new class of transaction or entirely new kind of company doesn't mean that the laws of nature and economics have been suspended for the rule of cool. It just means our squishy little chemical-bag brains haven't processed the new situation enough to codify it and share the information through our culture. Not fully understanding something Does Not Justify Woo! (And disturbingly, you don't have to search very hard in the startup scene to find some programmer-branded or startup-branded woo!)
Ignore this at your peril. The Rule of Cool won't protect you any more than respecting pilot seniority kept Asiana Airlines Flight 214 from crashing. (Korean American here, and yes, the example makes me get angry and cringe.)
The title of her book is Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs. This is a book that could only be written 5-10 years from now, but who knows where Apple could be then. She's striking while the iron is hot; if Apple is irrelevant and no one is interested in the company in 10 years, she wouldn't sell nearly as many books.
In other words, "The Rule of Cool."
Also, Tim Cook seems to be passionate about the company, especially given his emotional rebuttal of activist investors at the last shareholders meetings.[1]
[1] http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/tim-cook-soundly-reje...
I have to say that it seems darn hard to be a One. Not that it's easy to be a Two, but Ones have this mystical aspect about them that seem to ascribe their traits and success to something almost like genetics/luck/natural talent that hard work can never touch.
As creative as I think I am, I know that I lack the vision for being a really top-tier One. I'm good at analyzing problems, finding solutions for them, streamlining stuff, etc. So you could say that I'm a Two. And yet, here I am running a bad startup (and maybe it's because I don't seem to be a One that it's not going amazing? :D).
That being said, I'm really impressed with what Tim Cook is doing so far. Wooing and hiring the Burberry CEO seemed like a total upgrade on trying to get back the guy they lost to JC Penney (who later was fired anyway) to run their retail operations. All the medical-oriented rumors about the iWatch make me think that Apple hasn't yet lost its touch for making something mindblowing; it will be really interesting to see if they truly are introducing a totally new product category yet again. And the fact that Tim Cook can get all fiery during a public shareholder meeting to defend what many people will agree is the right thing to do demands respect.
Tim Cook may be a Two, rather than a One. But so far, I would not yet count Apple out just because he's a Two. I get the impression so far that he really can keep it together. I'm not making a prediction here, I'm just saying that I wouldn't count him out. So far, he has not done anything significantly bad enough to make me think he's the wrong guy for the job. In fact, I think he has done some good things.
And let's face it. I don't think even Steve Jobs would have been good enough to consistently introduce new product categories for the rest of his life, were he still here. That kind of track record is really tough to match for a single person. I may be wrong, but I think you need to ingrain that way of life into an entire organization for there to be any chance of continually doing it. And hopefully, that's what Tim Cook inherited.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
EDIT: clarify meaning.
Think about music composers, movie directors, athletes, political leaders, etc.
Is this just way Cook is? Or is this a forecast into the way Apple is? Everyone has said that Jobs was the visionary behind Apple, can Cook be the visionary after Jobs?
I think that Apple needs another visionary to drive the way it innovated in the late 90s and 00s when Jobs was there.
I know it might sound one-sided towards Jobs but I'm still yet to see the kind of innovation Apple had ever since Cook took over.
The only viable one I can think of is wearable tech, and definitely not a damn watch. I think Apple won't cater to as niche a market as wearable medical, and let 3rd party use their hardware to attack that market space.
Surely there is untapped potential in giving people greater day to day insights into their health, and obviously a lot of people care about their health.
Until it can analyze sweat for illnesses and nutrition info that won't get Apple in trouble legally (FDA...) and will spare you from going in for a check-up, then I don't think it's feasible at all for them to venture in that area.
MP3 players, smartphones, and tablets were all small "niche" markets before Apple entered them.
The two biggest for me will be an App Store for the AppleTV. This could put the end to Nintendo's console hopes forever and open up a lot of new revenue streams. And the biggest by far is payments. iBeacons is starting to take off and with AppleID/TouchID they have the frictionless security mechanism.
Look at how long it took Apple to do a tablet. The iPad launched more than a decade after Microsoft pushed their tablet vision; heck you could buy iBook tablet conversions for years before the iPad.
Samsung rushed their watch out the door to beat Apple to the market. Result: total dud. I'm not eager for Apple to try te same thing. Tim Cook will achieve the best success by pushing his folks to NOT launch until they have a blow-your-mind level product.
Consider the iPad. Isaacson's book revealed that iPad prototypes and multi-touch was actually created years ahead of the iPhone. However the power/weigh/performance ratios just weren't there for a compelling product. It was not until the scale of the iPhone drove down costs and improved technology that a compelling tablet experience was possible that Apple released the iPad. And even then in 2010 this was not an easy task. Go back and read the reviews for all the "me too" Android tablets that launch in the 2010-2011 compared to the original iPad. This is just one of a number of examples.
Apple will release a new product category if and when it feels it can make an impact there, not because of a time table set by technology pundits or analysts. This is just how they work.
2) They have gone on record saying that they will introduce "new product categories" this year, so we'll see whether they keep their promise.
Yes I'd love to see Apple move into new markets with new original products and services. I don't see any reason Apple today is any less likely to be able to do that than any other company.
There will be more revolutionary devices in the future. Will they be created in Cook's Apple? If they are created, is Cook the man to bring the right device to the market at the right time? That's what'll be interesting to see.
> "Without the arrival of a new charismatic leader, it will move from being a great company to being a good company," George Colony, the CEO of technology research firm Forrester Research, [FORR -0.08%] wrote in a blog. "Like Sony, [6758.TO +1.31%] Polaroid, Apple circa 1985, and Disney, [DIS +0.41%] Apple will coast and then decelerate."
So, the guy who runs the company whose price is falling says that Apple is heading for trouble, just like those other companies whose prices are rising.
User experience? Meh, who cares.
For that matter, I don't see failure to maintain explosive growth as a failure of any company. It might be a failure as far as the stock market is concerned, but it's deeply screwed up that this is the dynamic driving the stock market.
The stock market for much of the tech industry is completely driven by growth (or the promise of future growth). This is bad, this does not lead to a better tech industry, and this is not healthy for any of the companies involved. It's only healthy for short term investors, who unfortunately seem to be way overrepresented in the tech industry.
The Greater Fool Theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory) drives stock prices far more than the fundamental health or outlook for most tech companies.
Anyway, whenever I hear a complaint about company X because they haven't created some completely new product category in the past 12 months, I don't hear a complaint about the company. I hear a complaint about the stock price, which is driven by continuous (and possibly unhealthy for the company) growth, which drives the stock price due to the Greater Fool Theory as much anything else.
Such an opinion isn't even a commentary on the company- it's a commentary on a number (the stock price) that is most likely to go up when companies do risky and dangerous things (blow a ton of money trying to enter new markets or create new markets), and is completely disconnected from the fundamentals of the company, its profits, projections of its future profits, customer happiness and loyalty, and any number of other things that really ought to come in front of "short term explosive growth potential" when attempting to answer questions like, "is company X performing well?" or "is the CEO of company X doing a good job?".
What's worse is that when that number (again, the stock price) goes down due to a lack of growth in new product categories (Microsoft being the prime example here), it can force such a company to do things that are actively bad for it, because it is compelled to expend tons of resources floundering around trying to reinvent itself when no such complete reinvention is really necessary.
Just look at two companies that the stock market has been very kind to over the last 10 years: Amazon and Apple. Did Apple's stock go up because of its profit margins? Maybe somewhat, but I'm guessing that the market was really just responding to growth. Obviously Amazon's stock hasn't benefited from fat margins; growth is the only thing it has going for it, and it's done quite well.
In the Amazon case, I don't think there's even any concept anymore that someday it will slow down the growth and start fattening its margins. People used to say this like 10 years ago to explain the disconnect between Amazon's stock price and their margins, but I think at this point no one's even making vague allusions to that theory anymore. People buy Amazon stock because they think other people will buy Amazon stock based solely on growth. Someone might buy Amazon stock thinking that the whole growth thing is a scam, but they don't care because the stock price isn't based on Amazon's performance- it's based on how the buyer thinks other people will perceive Amazon's performance, scam or no. This is the Greater Fool Theory in a nutshell.
The thing is, no one can bring him back to life. He's gone forever and it seems like a lot of folks have not yet reached the "acceptance" stage of grief. And if I can be cynical for a moment, writers and reporters can make a nice living off exploiting that, by writing articles and books like this one.
Apple can still be a great company. It does not need to change the world every 4 years to accomplish that goal.
Life is not black and white. There is a huge range between best company in the world (how some people saw Apple toward the end of Jobs' 2nd tenure), and failure.
Then I say the world isn't filled with classes of "players"
How can we distinguish this statement from Jobs-worshiping woo? It feels like the truth, but we 21 century thinkers now know that that's not nearly enough to take something as actually being true.
Basically, this subscribes to the 19th century "Great Man" theory of history. I think there is something to Steve Job's insight, but he was also around in the right place at the right time.
There is a lot to be learned from hanging around a scene which is a little outside the mainstream experience, like music. If you get a little behind the scenes in a music scene, you'll find that there are a lot of people just as talented or even more talented than the stadium tour headliners, but didn't have the same strokes of good luck and/or weren't as good at marketing themselves.
The problem I have with applying "Great Man" theory to Steve Jobs, is that it tends to blind us to what he did right and what he didn't get right. Steve Jobs was very perceptive and had a demonstrated track record showing that he could analyze products in the marketplace from first principles.
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/3533.html
Steve Jobs most certainly was a great man. However he wasn't a god, he didn't possess an unknowable magic, and the harm to Silicon Valley done by people who blindly imitate his surface qualities in the hope of somehow receiving the same "cargo" is, I suspect, disturbingly large.
Results. He made Apple a huge success then come back and did it again. He took Pixar to wild successes whilst masterfully cutting deals with Disney. Even NeXT for all it's faults had some impressive technology back in the day.
He was indeed an A++ player not just for what he did but for what he represented. Himself and Bill Gates are the parents of the modern computing industry.
And I 100% that people who emulate him are just being idiots. His personality makes no sense without his unique history to back it up.
Yes, but I could also posit that Jobs was the only visionary type who not only had a POV that let him see under the surface of mainstream thinking but also had the good fortune of founding Apple, which enabled him to found his later enterprises. (If nothing else, than through the reputation it gained him.)