Comment by BitwiseFool
7 days ago
I suspect ego played a part in Steve Jobs selecting Tim Cook as his successor. Famous CEO's tend to pick a successor that is less charismatic and more risk-averse than they were. CEO's that retire 'honorably', so to speak, don't want someone who will outshine them or make sweeping changes to the brand or the company's organization. In other words, they want to preserve their legacy.
Tim Cook is exactly this kind of executive. While he has done an incredible job with leading the business and operational side of Apple, the public doesn't give credit for that sort of thing. Now imagine if Steve appointed someone just like himself and the business fumbled. Steve would hate for his legacy to be tarnished by appointing a brash successor.
All that being said, for what it's worth, I don't think anyone could have lived up to Steve's reputation. It is quite unfair to Tim Cook that he will always be compared to what people think Steve Jobs would have done.
IDK, I think Apple creating its own laptop/desktop-class CPU was a pretty bold move with a huge payoff. It's less sexy than introducing an entirely new category of product, but it's not exactly risk-averse either.
Cook saw it through, but Apple began moving towards replacing Intel back in 2008 (under Jobs) when they acquired P.A. Semi.
> While he has done an incredible job with leading the business and operational side of Apple
Can we say that yet? A lot of value was made in the short term, but it kinda feels like that would happen to any CEO that has an iPhone moment on their hands. Cook's real challenge was to flip the scenario into something sustainable; can Apple take the excitement and turn it into a product line?
They certainly tried. Cook led the charge on the Apple Watch, which fell short of a tentpole offering but still found an audience. Airpods took off, presumably after Cook learned from the failure (and acquisition) of Beats by Dre. And Vision Pro... the less said the better. Maybe there's something still in the holster, but I expect this to be a dead-end product line moreso than Airpower.
Are disposable headphones enough to build a legacy off of? The Apple Watch certainly isn't, and don't even get me started on Vision Pro. We could point to the big one that everyone likes to credit him as; "the supply chain guy", but even that seems to foster political contention in America. Apple's software faces antitrust scrutiny, privacy concerns[0], and an overall degradation in app quality as their attention splits into different markets. The legacy is the important question, and if Tim Cook were to resign tomorrow I think he would be remembered as the CEO that screwed Apple over for good.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
> They certainly tried. Cook led the charge on the Apple Watch, which fell short of a tentpole offering but still found an audience.
That's an interesting way to say "is the best selling watch model of all time, and outsells not only all other smartwatches combined but also a substantial chunk of all normal watches put together."
> is the best selling watch model of all time, and outsells not only all other smartwatches combined
Apple has about 25% of the global marketshare for smartwatches: https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/global-smartwa... They are the _largest_ supplier, but they certainly don't outsell everyone combined.
It also took Apple about 4 years to find the actual use-case for the Apple Watch: health tracking and payments.
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You forgot M1 macs.
Steve knew he'd dead by the time the next CEO's results were in. Do you really think he'd prefer Apple to stagnate rather than continue to soar with a great CEO after his dead?