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Apple is now run by a guy who is more like John Sculley than Steve Jobs
- brashrat 10y agoA personality like Steve Jobs's would never tolerate having another Steve Jobs around, so this is what I always assumed. Steve was always laser focused on a small number of elements to create buzz (one button, really thin, it's a cube...) and a small number of products (goodbye old model, here is new model, it's not compatible). Tim Cook has been adding blur from the first moment. I also see an odd parallel in another corporate transition... even though it's the same leadership, is the new re/code more than a shadow of the old All Things D?
- mwfunk 10y agoTim Cook is an operations guy, Steve Jobs was a product guy. Tim Cook hasn't been "adding blur" to anything. CEOs have an executive role but whatever they do beyond the usual management and delegation stuff is more a function of their personal interests than explicit responsibilities that are part of the job description. It's very unusual for CEOs to micromanage product design, and in most cases it's an organizational antipattern when they do.
- jalfresi 10y agoAPPLE IS DOOMED! DOOOOOOMMMMED! /s
- dang 10y agoPlease don't do this here.
- slantaclaus 10y agoI've been saying this for years. Everyone always defended him as if he were actually responsible for Apple's success
- acqq 10y agoHow about dialing down the "growth" expectations? How big do you expect Apple to be for $deity sake? They are big. Much bigger than ever. Now it's not about big "growth" anymore, it's about staying big. Edit: whoever wants to give some meaningful arguments can maybe use some comparable company as an example. AAPL Mkt cap: 531,84B MSFT Mkt cap: 382,79B
- pavlov 10y agoIf "no more growth" is going to be Apple's story to investors, the company needs to start paying a much bigger dividend.
- acqq 10y agoCan you please elaborate, let's say, comparing AAPL with MSFT as an example? http://www.streetinsider.com/dividend_history.php?q=aapl http://www.streetinsider.com/dividend_history.php?q=aapl http://www.streetinsider.com/dividend_history.php?q=msft http://www.streetinsider.com/dividend_history.php?q=msft
- osweiller 10y agoIf you exclude the cash horde (edit - the zombies hired to protect the vault full of cash), Apple's P/E ratio is running at around 5 right now. IBM is 10. Microsoft is about 35 if excluding their much smaller cash pile. Apple is ridiculously "undervalued" compared to any peer in the industry. It is a money printing colossus. Having said that, the market seems to get shivers around $600B, and that psychological barrier imposes a friction that makes the rules of the game change. No one can stay above that for long, and in the case of Apple its profoundly out of scale numbers makes everyone simply put it in a different universe of valuation.
- flurpitude 10y ago*hoard. Horde is zombies.
- MollyR 10y agoIs that really the whole story ? http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-isnt-really-sitting-on-216-billion-in-cash-2016-01-26 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-isnt-really-sitting-o... I honestly don't know and am interested in what you think of this article.
- kyriakos 10y agothere's a limit of how many shiny things you can sell. it's not tim cook's fault. apple is diversifying, if the car rumors are true it means that they are trying something totally new. its just that building a revolutionary car takes a lot more planning and effort than creating a new iteration of iphone.
- coldcode 10y agoJohn Sculley sold sugar water and never did anything worthwhile after that. Tim Cook is running the world's most valuable company with more cash than most of the world's countries put together. He's not Jobs, no one is. It's like complaining if you are not Einstein there is no point in being a physicist because you won't change the world forever.
- emodendroket 10y agoSo? As the article says, from Cook's position many executives would have made a capable run of the past five years; the question is what Apple is going to do in the future.
- yardie 10y agoMy money is on self-driving cars. They have AI (Siri), Maps, Location (through Yelp and partners) the only thing left is a physical car. Their Carplay SDK is just them dipping a toe in. I expect, like the Moto Rokkr, it's going to go from a partnership to an all out race.
- scholia 10y agoSculley was a success at Apple: he took annual revenues from $0.98bn in 1983 to $8.00bn in 1993. After Steve Jobs's Macintosh flopped, Sculley saved it with the Mac II. Jobs rejoined Apple in 1997 when turnover was $7.078bn, after which turnover declined to $5.36bn in 2001 before recovering to $8.28bn in 2004. So Apple did better when Sculley was in charge ($0.98bn in 1983 to $8.00bn in 1993) than in the next decade, when he wasn't ($8.00bn in 1993 to $6.02bn in 2003). What Sculley didn't do was successfully introduce non-Mac products (iPod, iPhone, iPad), which Jobs did. The jury is out on whether Cook can do that too.....
- whatever_dude 10y agoTo me there's a fascinating story there. Sculley was working for the today and Jobs for the tomorrow. Doing either by itself is disastrous: living for today means the company doesn't innovate and once its market momentum slows down it'll die (RIM, Nokia?), and thinking too far ahead mean they cannot polish their products and get the most they can of the current market either. Apple without the return of Jobs wouldn't exist - it wouldn't have innovated in anything. But without Sculley to give it some solid ground for a few years, it would probably have gone bankrupt. Next few years will be interesting.
- snowwrestler 10y agoRemember that the Newton--which as a product concept was far ahead of its time--was developed and launched under Sculley. So was OpenDoc, the Apple "Advanced Technology Group," Quicktime, Quicktime VR, etc. So I would not say that Apple failed to think about the future under Sculley. It's not easy to understand or describe why Jobs succeeded as wildly as he did in his 2nd tour at Apple. If it was, everyone would be doing it. :-) One thing I rarely see discussed is the importance of the time in which Steve Jobs succeeded. The success we ascribe now, in hindsight, to Jobs' incredible leadership, might be in part the result of just a good match between what Jobs could do, and what could succeed in the market at that time. His principles did not really change that much, actually--he always believed in owning as much of the tech stack as he could, and in producing integrated products with custom hardware and software. That approach was too expensive and inflexible to compete against Microsoft PCs the first time he was at Apple. It failed at NeXT. But it succeeded wildly the second time around, at Apple. Would Apple be doing much better now under Steve Jobs' leadership? I don't think it's entirely clear. Some aspects of Apple's success continue to match up with Jobs' vision, but the areas in which Apple seems to have the most challenges--services and interoperable ecosystems--were never really Jobs' strong suits.
- Bud 10y agoThere are many things in this article I feel compelled to attack or nitpick about. But just to highlight one: the assertion that "the big problem is that Apple’s last hit product, the iPad, came under Jobs and launched six years ago". That ignores the Apple Watch, which has basically created a new product category and proceeded to immediately account for more than half the total sales in that category. The Watch has outsold the iPhone during its early days, as well. For any other company, this would be reported on as a great triumph. Unless you have wild fantasies that Apple is supposed to magically produce an iPhone-sized business every two years, even though no other company in the history of money has ever produced an iPhone-sized business even one time. Double-digit millions of units of sales, first year, for a brand-new product that nobody's ever spent $400+ per unit on is pretty good.
- talmand 10y ago>> ...which has basically created a new product category... What?
- fredsir 10y agoHow many smartwatches did you see announced before the rumors of the Apple Watch emerged?
- Grue3 10y agoRegardless of how many were announced, I haven't actually seen one being used in the wild, Apple Watch or not.
- geon 10y agoLike 3?
- jonwachob91 10y agoI saw 3 on one elevator ride yesterday...
- typetypetype 10y agoI remember an anecdote in the Steve Jobs biography where the first thing he did when he came back to Apple was severly cutting down a confusing and overlapping matrix of products. Now that he's gone, that matrix is creeping back up. I've lost count how many different types of iPhones and iPads there are now.
- k-mcgrady 10y agoThere are 2 types of iPhone (standard and plus) and three types of iPad (Mini, Air, Pro). All of the other variants are just older models that remain on sale so people within £600 to spend on a phone can afford to become Apple customers.
- booop 10y agoYou forgot the iphone SE, it's much worse for the Apple watch and Macbooks.
- aljones 10y agoBut there are 3 types of Apple Watch and 3 types of MacBooks.
- adriancooney 10y agoThree types of Macbooks because of the size requirements but why three different types of watch? I'm in the camp of believing Apple's product line-up is too big. It's having a huge negative impact on their software quality too.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- a_c_s 10y agoThe watch types are really clearly differentiated though: Sport: cheaper model, a little better for athletic activity (screen is more impact-resistant but less scratch resistant) regular: main model, styled more like a classic watch, screen is more scratch resistant but less impact resistant Edition: made of gold, super-expensive The Edition watch specifically isn't going to be confused with the other two models, and the Sport/regular split seems pretty straightforward to me.
- jamespitts 10y agoIt has been a long time since the metaphor comparing apples to oranges was more apt.
- snowwrestler 10y agoNobody was like Steve Jobs. So if that's the complaint against Tim Cook, well, take a number. You could say the same thing about 7 billion other people. Tim Cook has a few things over John Sculley. A big difference is that Tim was at Apple for decades before taking over as CEO. He joined Apple in 1998 as an SVP, which means he was part of Steve Jobs' leadership team for the entirety of Apple's resurgence. The article says: > Jobs obviously saved the company years later with the iMac, iPod, Macbook, iTunes, iPhone and iPad. Tim Cook was part of the Apple leadership team for every single one of those products. There hasn't been a "Steve Jobs era" followed by a "Tim Cook era." There was a "Steve Jobs + Tim Cook era" and now it continues as a "Tim Cook era." And other people too, of course. Ctrl-F in the article for "Ive"--no results. An article about the past and future of Apple that doesn't mention Jonathan Ive? Looks like another in a long line of "cult of personality" articles that ascribe all success--or failure--to a single person, the CEO. There are many other differences from Sculley. Tim Cook has been Apple CEO before--this is his 2nd turn at it. He's a believer and defender of Apple's culture. He personally understands computer engineering. He has personal principles that he advocates for. Etc. Apple has always had an ecosystem of second-guessers telling it what it should do differently. The greatest strength of Tim Cook as CEO is that he, like Jobs, doesn't listen to those folks.
- mojojojo15 10y ago>An article about the past and future of Apple that doesn't mention Jonathan Ive? Can someone explain this to me. I keep hearing about how big Jonathan Ive is in relation to Apple and I think I've even seen a book that claims he is the genius behind Apple. But from what I see and understand he is mostly a designer who executed on Steve Job's ideas (it's hard to think of the very quirky and exacting design of Apple Products not having some major input from the quirky and exacting Jobs) and I've even read somewhere that his major contribution to the original Ipod (arguably the product most responsible for Apple's comeback) was the white color of the earphones. Are you sure you're not just replacing the cult of Jobs/Cook with the cult of Ives. I genuinely would like to know why a product designer gets so much praise/credit for Apples success since great design is only one of many reasons (and probably not even the most important) for the great products they make
- gumby 10y agoThis oversells Jobs' execution. Let's not forget that he once held a whole media event to announce...an ipod dock. And Apple forecast the iPhone as possibly eventually capturing 1% of the phone market. The iPhone is an extra-extraordinary product, but even in retrospect it wasn't considered as amazing when it came out. The watch reminds me of the iPod in terms of when it entered the market (somewhat early, after others had probed and validated it a bit) and under-the-radar adoption rate. If you ignore personalities, the question really is: can the machine continue to pump out extraordinary products. Not "can the machine pump out another iPhone".
- messick 10y agoI never worked for Steve, but do work with a lot of people who did. I never heard once heard someone say: Man, I sure wish Steve was still here instead of Tim. Not that Steve isn't missed, of course. It's just that Tim is also great.