Macworld:
Cook’s specialty is the running of the business, and at that he excels. But he also knows when to let his team do its job, and doesn’t try to replicate the way Jobs ran the company.
The more I consider it, the more I’ve begun to think that even were Jobs still around, Cook might still be the better choice for CEO in this day and age. Can you imagine Jobs being as receptive as Cook was to calls for improved diversity at Apple? Or embracing social media? Or posing for selfies? Yeah, me neither.
Any discussion that Cook isn’t a good CEO in general or “good enough for Apple” is utterly ridiculous. Cook is arguably a better CEO for Apple, at least right now, than Jobs would have been.
Had Jobs lived, wouldn’t he have taken a less-hands-on role in the business by now, anyway, considering how much it’s grown and changed?
People who criticize the way Apple is now run don’t seem to have very many exemplars to point to for comparison.
Extrapolating from the past, Jobs’ nature wouldn’t have allowed him to be as hands off as Cook seems to be.
Jobs and Cook are both excellent CEOs. Should Cook take the helm of Apple in 2007, Apple would not be as successful as it is today. Likewise, should Jobs remain as a CEO today, everything would be different. (i.e, Swift vs Apple would be a lose lose situation, Apple is very unlikely to give in to Swift’s request, at least not in a day’s notice.)
TL;DR, they are both equally great, albeit at a different time.
Diversity? He always pushed diversity. Apple was pro gay rights years ago. That was a cheap shot.
CEO only? Or products guy? Jobs was both. Cook is not. Jobs was unique and can never be fully replaced.
“Arguably the best CEO”…for Apple the business, but not Apple the product creator. In my opinion 😉
If you change Apple to Microsoft and Cook to Ballmer and Jobs to Gates, you can send this article back 10 years in time and publish it in PC World every single week.
Tim Cook is not the issue. He’s as good a CEO as you could probably hope to find anywhere. It’s people like Craig Federighi and Alan Dye who need to be fired. Craig Federighi has shipped the least-reliable versions of iOS and Mac OS X ever. Premium iOS and Mac software has been reduced to the reliability of free Web apps. Alan Dye completed the picture by applying a fairly mediocre website design to the whole thing, mocking the entire Apple history of designing user interfaces instead of just getting a graphic designer to make the software look like the website.
So the scorecard for me during the Tim Cook era looks like this:
I mean, it’s great that Tim Cook is a great administrator and has so many great personal qualities, but that is not why I buy products from Apple. I buy them solely to get more-reliable and easier-to-use products, so that I can do more work in less time, or better work in the same time, or enjoy work more. From 1999 through 2012, every year I got better computing, either through new hardware or software, and then from 2013 through 2015, I got worse and worse computing. To me that is the only indicator of success or failure. And by that measure, the post-Jobs Apple is a failure for me at this point in time.