I haven’t always liked how Tim Cook interacted with President Trump and I feel that Apple’s product line has become bloated, but, overall, I don’t think anyone else could have been a better successor to the legendary Steve Jobs.
Don’t underestimate Cook’s role in Apple’s amazing success story as several reports from industry publications have noted.
° From Business Insider: Tim Cook is the ultimate non-founder success story. As he steps down as Apple CEO after 15 years, that’s the biggest takeaway for me.
I called Tim Cook a loser in 2013. He went on to make Apple the biggest winner and prove Silicon Valley wrong.
… Was Cook as innovative as Apple’s cofounder? Maybe not. The company scrapped a self-driving car project after years of struggles. The Vision Pro was a pricy flop, and there’s a big question about whether Apple is behind in AI.
However, there are still new wearable gadgets in the works, and Apple has so far avoided the massive capex that other Big Tech companies are throwing at AI. That could turn out to be Cook’s final victory.
But the market doesn’t lie, especially over many years: Apple is the second, or third, most valuable public company in the world — and Tim Cook made that happen.
° From Fortune: Tim Cook is stepping down. No one is shocked. And that’s a good example of how his critics always underestimated him.
…. the incrementalist. Cook was long dogged by unfair comparisons to Apple’s founder, Steve Jobs. Jobs was the visionary who gave us the iPhone, the iPod, and the iPad. Cook was dismissed as “the operations guy,” an incrementalist who failed to introduce a revolutionary new hardware product. (Although he did launch the Apple Watch and AirPods.)
… Incrementalism is underrated, in other words. “The operations guy” took Apple from a minority market position in devices to dominate consumer computing today. Are you reading this on a ThinkPad? Almost certainly not. Few who use a MacBook ever return to Windows. And the reason for that is precisely because Apple’s products go through revolutions only rarely. You are reading this on your iPhone or MacBook because those devices are solid, reliable, and they just work.
° From Cult of Mac: While nobody could match the vision and drive of the late Steve Jobs, retiring Apple CEO Tim Cook definitely comes in a very close second. In a remarkable 15 years at the helm of Apple, Cook oversaw extraordinary growth, released a string of innovative products, and instituted important internal changes.
° From Ben Thompson in Apple 3.0: The numbers, to be clear, are extraordinary. Cook became CEO of Apple on August 24, 2011, and in the intervening 15 years revenue has increased 303%, profit 354%, and the value of Apple has gone from $297 billion to $4 trillion, a staggering 1,251% increase.
The reason for Cook’s accession in 2011 became clear a mere six weeks later, when Steve Jobs passed away from cancer on October 5, 2011. Jobs’ death isn’t the reason Cook was chosen — Cook had already served as interim CEO while Jobs underwent treatment in 2009 — but I think the timing played a major role in making Cook arguably the greatest non-founder CEO of all time.
My take: Strange category, but I can’t think of a greater non-founder CEO. Can you?”
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