Carolina Milanesi wrote an interesting piece at Tech.pinions:
But different is not necessarily bad. Tim Cook has a different personality than Steve Jobs and, as we learned from this week’s interviews, a different management style. We certainly see a more open, humble, inclusive, socially engaged leader that, in my view, has softened, not weakened Apple’s image as a company. As I mentioned, we cannot just look at management and think the Apple we see today has not been impacted by the markets it plays in. Let’s think about some of the things that are different today.
Tim Cook is a great leader and provides a human side to Apple that we have never seen before. I can’t imagine the challenges the management team goes through in preparing new products or working on the new products that we don’t even know about yet. In order to lose confidence in Apple, you would have to think they are no longer trying to innovate its current or future products—I don’t believe that.
The thing we lost with Steve (well, one of them…) is his eye for design not just in terms of how it looks or even how it works but the intersection of how it all works, looks and how it feels in the hands of people who aren’t techies, what he once described as the intersection of technology and the humanities. That, plus the founder’s ability to say “No, not good enough, try again” is simply irreplaceable.
That doesn’t mean Apple has lost its way or that they cannot turn out great stuff, but when we look at them redoing the Music UI or the Watch UI, I wonder if those would have simply been done better the first time were Steve signing off on them. Obviously, we’ll never know.
The thing everyone is missing is that Tim Cook can be an outstanding CEO and Apple can still suck because what they are missing right now is an Editor-in-Chief like a newspaper or magazine. The latter was the key job that Steve Jobs did for Apple, not CEO. An Editor-in-Chief causes the whole newspaper to seem to be written and edited in one voice. He or she is resented by writers and editors because they all want to be Editor-in-Chief but it makes the product much better. He or she reigns in the typical self-indulgence of writers, editors — or designers and engineers — and gets them working on one common product.
So the problem or solution is not necessarily Tim Cook. He is obviously a top rank business person and executive and super smart and clearly loves Apple. The problem is the Editor-in-Chief chair has been empty for 6 or 7 years and so the Apple product line is now a typical tech company product line of semi-random self-indulgent pet projects from designers and engineers, such that the user is wholly responsible for integrating their own tech into a cohesive computing experience in whatever way they can. Same as with generic tech, which Apple is supposed to be an alternative to. And the user has to do that with an iPhone/iPad line that is too complicated, has too low battery life for modern use, and is too expensive and still too dominated by carriers. The user has to decode a Mac line that is literally 10 years out of date (it is functionally the same as the 2006 Mac) and software that is best explained by a friend of mine who said, “I wish Apple still made their own software, because this IBM-made software from the past few years is shit.” He thought the 2012 IBM deal was Apple turning over all software design and engineering to IBM, so that it would be made to appeal to corporate users. I really couldn’t argue with him. I think his explanation is figuratively true even if not literally.
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This story is starting to become old real fast. Steve died in 2011 and Tim has been in charge since then. Time to drop these dumb spartcles pinning that Apple is doomed for some reason!