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Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple

• ahuja_s 10y ago
  Now that we have Nadella, it's kind of scary for Tim Cook to be compared to Ballmer...
  • neolefty 10y ago
    How so? To an outsider who knows very little, Nadella seems to be doing great.
    • alexdumitru 10y ago
      Exactly.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • nucotano 10y ago
      Isn't he kind of ruining Windows?
      • LaSombra 10y ago
        I think sometimes you have to break it to make it good/great again, like the first Mac OS X release. That's my 2¢. The fact that Microsoft is increasing revenue on Azure, for example, shows they are jumping on a bandwagon that should give them another revenue stream that they can use to reinvest. I might be wrong, but that's how I see it.
        • nucotano 10y ago
          Well, I'm going to be honest here, I don't give two shits about Azure. Not only because I don't use that (I don't run any system, etc) but because there are dozens of providers. Unfortunately Windows is one of a kind, so if he ruins it (and 10 is definitely a step back from 8.1, from what I've seen) he's ruined something really important for some of us, something with no known replacement. (No, OS X and Linux don't count, because they don't run the Win32 API)
          • piyush_soni 10y ago
            I don't know. From what I (and many others) have seen, Windows 10 is a big improvement over 8.1.
          • sbuttgereit 10y ago
            As someone that primarily uses windows, that's not my experience at all. Windows 7 was great; Windows 8 was a parade of misguided user experience experiments, Windows 8.1 was at best a patch over 8 (I still needed third party extensions to make the experience decent). Windows 10, I no longer need third party extensions, I no longer need the VMs for Linux that I use to keep around with the WSL. Honestly, I've been pleased on the whole. We can talk about privacy and the biggest misfeature that has cropped up in Windows 10 (automatic upgrades, especially automatic restarts... which I've since disabled)... but on just day-in-day-out user experience Windows 10 is vastly superior as compared to Windows 8.x.
            • icebraining 10y ago
              But is 10 significantly better than 7?
              • sbuttgereit 10y ago
                Not particularly, I would think, for the average user. The WSL stuff is a major improvement for me personally, I also recently bought a new workstation class system where I had the choice of 10 Pro or 7 pre-installed and, not having any legacy software issues to worry about, chose 10. I was happy with 7 and am happy with 10. All other things being equal, the newer version would seem to make more sense. Again, unless you're concerned about the privacy issues or have special need for non-automatic updates/restarts, which really I think are a minority of users, 10 carries incremental improvements in my experience. Having said that, the free upgrade period would have likely been a good thing to take advantage of for the average 7 user... paying for the upgrade now, not so much.
          • kbenson 10y ago
            > 10 is definitely a step back from 8.1, from what I've seen 10 has been an advance in every single aspect I can think of. What are you seeing as being ruined?
      • digi_owl 10y ago
        The "consumer" editions have become more restrictive indeed. But the professional editions, Microsoft bread and butter, is the same as always as best i can tell.
      • pyrophane 10y ago
        How so? I personally don't like all the pre-installed and unremovable stuff like Xbox, the fact that turning off Cortana is now really difficult, and how many knobs you have to turn to keep the os from sending everything you type to MS. Is that what's is ruining it, or is there something else?
        • tkinom 10y ago
          It is easy to use Windows Firewall to block XBox, Cotana, etc from access Internet. I blocked all windows 10 services (svrhost) layer from Internet except DNS and NTP. In my windows 10 system, only firefox get to the net unrestricted. After that, windows 10 is actually a joy to use.
          • nucotano 10y ago
            I did that, but it meant I couldn't use Bing anymore (I like it because I can use the "ip:" search operator to find domains hosted on a certain ip address).
        • angstrom 10y ago
          That's been the argument since Windows XP and to a lesser extend Windows 98SE were released. Too much has been added! From my experience the thing I dislike about Windows 10 is how often I find myself using WidnowsKey+X to use it.
          • chadgeidel 10y ago
            I've been around a bit longer. I remember that pretty much every "major windows version" (including the first) drew ire from Microsoft PC users. People complained about the transition from DOS to Windows (which was rough), from Windows 3.1 (and WFW) to 95, 98 to ME (probably one of the worst transitions), 98 to XP, XP to Vista (which had 90% of what everyone loved in 7), 7 to 8, and now 7 to 10. Each iteration people hated it, then loved it. I don't think it's any kind of "Stockholm syndrome", each version introduced and refined new functionality that people grew to love. What a "Desktop OS" means seems to be really in a state of flux right now, so it remains to be seen if people love 10 (I'm enjoying it, but then again I liked Vista).
      • yuhong 10y ago
        I wonder if Terry is more to blame.
• bshimmin 10y ago
  Apologies for this most gratuitous of bikeshedding, but if you're going to use proper superscripts, please sort out the line-heights.
  • egwynn 10y ago
    I’ve never thought of this and never noticed it until you pointed it out. And now it’ll probably bother me forever.
    • kbenson 10y ago
      I was going to say it's probably like vocal fry, where once you hear it you're supposed to hear it everywhere, but I've never heard it myself. In making sure I remembered the name right and googling it, I found a video and I was able to hear it fairly clearly for the first time. Now I'm afraid I've inflicted myself with this. :/
  • ticklemyelmo 10y ago
    You should be complaining to your browser vendor. It looks fine in Firefox.
• vi4m 10y ago
  No.
• coldcode 10y ago
  That's a dreadful comparison and makes no sense.
• bischofs 10y ago
  Tim Cook is a "Bozo" - He has moved the focus away from computers and the companies core professional users and turned Apple into a fashionable health services company. They will coast for a while on their dominant mobile market share but eventually the stagnation and lack of new products will catch up to them. He built a watch, which was a "me too" product and answered a question that no one asked. Jobs would never have done this because of the marginal increase in utility that smart watches provides users. He also wasted company time and resources on trying to build a car, which is completely outside Apple's skill sets (the supply chains and profit margins are radically different). It seemed like he was just trying to do something innovative instead of actually looking at the needs and demands of users inside the computing industry where apple should be focused. Its unfortunate that Jobs didn't see his lack of product development skills when he made him CEO - Jobs always talked about how product companies falter when marketing/sales/supply chain guys run the company and not product guys.
  • zimpenfish 10y ago
    Your frequent reminded that people have said "They will coast for a while on their dominant mobile market share but eventually the stagnation and lack of new products will catch up to them" about Apple -every- -single- -year- since about 2007. And yet, they endure.
    • pjmlp 10y ago
      I remember a different Apple around 1994 - 96, almost getting ready to close doors, if it hadn't been bought by NeXT (which is what actually happened).
      • yuhong 10y ago
        I was for a while thinking of the case where Apple bought NeXT, but Gil Amelio and later Ellen Hancock stayed as CEO. While PC margins was declining, I was thinking that Apple could mostly focus on the higher-end PC and workstation markets. I wonder how this would have compared to Tim Cook.
  • 10y ago
• zekevermillion 10y ago
  Even if I generally agree with disappointment at the apparent "maintenance mode" of Apple's product line, I am not sure Ballmer is the best analogy. My understanding is that Tim Cook actually is responsible for many of the supply chain innovations behind Apple's dominant product lines. This is an incredibly hard technical feat, not just blustery MBA crap. I suppose it remains to be seen whether Apple can put its enormous cash hoard to work in R&D and new product development. It could be possible for Apple to go the way of RIM but I think it would be very hard to kill them given their unique supply chain efficiencies (not to mention brand and balance sheet).
  • protomyth 10y ago
    If you take a look back, Steve Ballmer was responsible for a lot of the success of Microsoft. He mostly got hate because people hated Microsoft. I'm don't think Ballmer's list of accomplishments at Microsoft is fully appreciated particularly compared to the good press Tim Cook as enjoyed.
    • digi_owl 10y ago
      My impression is that he got less hate and more ridicule. Sure, Gates looked like the archetype nerd any time he presented something. But not was lightyears better than the whole "developers developers developers" dance Ballmer managed to pull. Sadly the tech media have over the years blended over into lifestyle media. No longer is the computer or phone something to get a job done and that's it, now its a indicator of how you see yourself and how you want others to see you. And that image goes all the way back to the company making them, and the people that are the faces of said company.
      • wastedhours 10y ago
        Whilst I agree tech has blended with lifestyle, I don't see it as "sad", its perception being more akin to other aspects of personal identity isn't to be seen as derogatory but celebrated as it's expanded the market and the media interest in reporting on it.
    • 10y ago
• bad_user 10y ago
  The article is short on details why he thinks Tim Cook is like Steve Ballmer, except for saying that Apple is slowly missing the boat on AI. I don't know what Amazon does for AI, I haven't seen anything convincing from them, but I'll trust the author that they are working on it. However it's tough to beat Google in this space, because AI and machine learning is what Google has focused on since their beginnings. Google's own Search has always been a limited form of AI on which most humans with access to the Internet have come to depend upon. And it is tough to beat them because they not only have 20 years of accumulated knowledge and talent, but they also have a lot of data on users and haven't been afraid to break users' privacy in order to get that data. Now say what you will of Tim Cook, but he's nothing like Steve Ballmer, with one big difference being that Tim Cook's Apple is making a stand for privacy and security, which is actually quite rare to witness in this day and age. He's a man with principles and for this I appreciate him a lot, maybe more than I ever appreciated Steve Jobs. It would also be stupid to try and beat Google on their own turf. It would be like trying to beat Microsoft at Windows or Office, or Amazon at AWS. And for important markets, Apple's secret is that they never had to beat anyone in market share, all they had to do was to take over an important slice of the high-end market, which is something they are really good at.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • Roritharr 10y ago
    > He's a man with principles and for this I appreciate him a lot, maybe more than I ever appreciated Steve Jobs. Is he really? I mean from a strategic point of view he currently only has to gain from giving that outward appearance. Occam's Razor tells me that he is just luckily able to tread the high road because for him its the one without toll booths.
    • bad_user 10y ago
      Well, if you're going to apply Occam's Razor, given that as a matter of fact most people don't give a shit about security or privacy, it's actually not in Apple's best interest to make this stand, at least when speaking short term, as it is negating them future revenue opportunities. And they aren't doing it only in their press releases, but in their products as well. I'd enumerate features of iOS or OS X that have been very well thought out in this regard, but that would make for a blog post.
• fatbird 10y ago
  The single useful thing the article could have presented was how or why Cook's/Apple's efforts at AI products will fail while Google's will succeed; how Apple's AI products will be the Windows Phone of Cook's tenure (or, for that matter, how Windows Phone failed or could have been done differently). Without explaining how apparently similar efforts will yield different outcomes, this is all jazz-hands about CEO personalities and Fortune buzzwords.
  • Quequau 10y ago
    Man, I only have one thing about the pseudo-AI craze that I'd like to hear from Apple to get my business: Seeing how their current top end SoC is so powerful, stop sending all sorts of data to external parties to offload the compute requirements to make stuff like Siri work.
    • nicky0 10y ago
      I thought Apple specifically didn't send your data to external parties. That's one of the reason Siri is behind Google, which does send you data to their servers.
      • icebraining 10y ago
        AFAIK that's not correct, which is why it doesn't work offline. See e.g.: "[Nuance rep] said that Siri has both embedded and cloud technology for voice recognition, but that the feature is overall a cloud solution." http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/05/30/nuance-confirms-its-technology-is-behind-apples-siri http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/05/30/nuance-confirms-it...
      • honkhonkpants 10y ago
        That's completely backwards. If you try to use Siri while your phone is offline, it reads "Siri not available / Connect to the Internet." Google's voice system works perfectly well offline. You can dictate, or you can issue commands that don't require network access.
      • 10y ago
• sven-51 10y ago
  Applies to Pichai at Google too. Google was a search company that put the browser/mobile guy in charge. You are not going to see stuff like this http://aurelieherbelot.net/pears/ http://aurelieherbelot.net/pears/ http://aurelieherbelot.net/how-small-is-the-world-wide-web-really/ http://aurelieherbelot.net/how-small-is-the-world-wide-web-r... come out of Google for the simple reason they are busy playing empire defense all the while the need for a centralized search engine reduces.
  • digi_owl 10y ago
    Nah, Google is first and foremost about ads. Search was just a damn good gateway for pushing those ads. Now you get them pushed on phones and laptops (chromebook) as well.
  • uiri 10y ago
    Isn't that the whole point of Alphabet? Google can play empire defense while Larry & Sergey make bets by creating subsidiaries and funding them with Google's free cash flow. I think Google's board recognized this phenomenon of large companies becoming risk averse and restructured in this way to try to avoid it.
  • vthallam 10y ago
    Really? Sundar Pichai is a product guy and all he is trying to do now is push their AI research and apply existing innovations to all consumer product lines(search,maps,photos,assistant,home,pixel etc) which i think is the need of hour. Search will be the key thing Google does, but they are strategically building product lines(conversation UI) so that they don't miss out on how people search for stuff.
• ungzd 10y ago
  These hyped "conversational interfaces" and augmented reality remind me of Clippy and Microsoft Bob. And IoT is real disaster, not innovation. So good that they're not jumping onto these bandwagons.
  • ubercore 10y ago
    A non-disastrous IoT ecosystem would be real innovation. I'm still waiting for it!
• scrrr 10y ago
  Website-idea: Make a list of previous articles that predict the future of Apple. ;)
  • alanh 10y ago
    You could call it “Claim Chowder” and put this linked list up on a domain like, i dunno, daringfireball.net :)
• kimar 10y ago
  Funny that the article fails to mention Jony Ive as the obvious successor to Cook. Doesn't it look like Apple has its next "creative CEO" all prepped up?
  • nicky0 10y ago
    I wouldn't say it looks like that. Ive very rarely makes public appearances or speaks on behalf of the company. We know he's a brilliant designer, but this doesn't necessarily make him a good fit for CEO.
  • mikhailt 10y ago
    I'm curious you think it is "obvious"? I've never heard anyone say this of Ive until now with your comment. Jobs did make sure Apple has no power to ever get rid of Ive for any reason, ensuring him an unbreakable tenure. However, to me, it's far more obvious that he will never take on the CEO role because I think he's prepping to retire from Apple in the next few years as there's a reason we've been seeing less and less of him over the past few years, with his strong desire to move back to England with his family and so on. The only two people that's more obvious to me is Williams and Schiller but I don't think Cook is going to be gone for another decade.
    • itomato 10y ago
      Next CEO will be an outsider.
• erikb 10y ago
  "got a major release of Windows out without the usual trauma"? Did he already release Windows8? If Steve Blank talks about Windows 10 he must have missed something, or the usual trauma he experiences is way worse than what I would even think possible as an extreme case.
• e15ctr0n 10y ago
  The article mentions Mark Zuckerberg only in passing but it is worth noting that Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are another visionary-CEO + world-class-executor "dynamic duo" in Silicon Valley. Who will replace Mark Zuckerberg after his departure? If it's Sheryl Sandberg, the same Steve Ballmer / Tim Cook scenario will repeat itself and we can look forward to future articles like "Why Sheryl Sandberg is the next Tim Cook and why she still has her job at Facebook".
• bnegreve 10y ago
  Luck is generally involved in success. So maybe this is just regression toward the mean and hasn't that much to do with whoever is the CEO. In other words, every very successful company is bound to be less successful later. Nothing really exciting about this.
  • ufmace 10y ago
    That's what I tend to wonder about these visionary types - how much of it is really a skill or talent that they have, and how much is just picking the right thing at the right time. If Bill Gates had stayed in charge, would he have forseen how the industry would change and gotten out ahead of it in time, or be blindsided like everybody else? If Steve Jobs was still alive, would he keep churning out industry-changers, or start to flop? Would either of them do something amazing if they had been born 50 years earlier instead?
    • j1vms 10y ago
      > If Steve Jobs was still alive, would he keep churning out industry-changers If he were alive and well, I think so. With the exception of iPad (which wasn't subpar by industry standards but certainly signaled a descent into mediocrity for Apple, and which I would attribute to Jobs' slowly disengaging with the company due to his health issues), Jobs was on an unbelievable streak between his return in the late 90s and about 2009/2010. In the span of about 10 years, his company did several outstanding feats in holistic hardware/software design, and it can't be a coincidence that the man was then largely healthy and in command. I do think that would have probably continued until the mid to latter part of this decade had he continued in better health.
• programminggeek 10y ago
  One important thing that visionaries get credit for, but perhaps shouldn't... Being in the right place at the right time. It is a delightful bit of luck that Steve Jobs made it back to Apple. That scenario could have been way different where Apple bought BeOS, and Steve Jobs didn't return to Apple. If Jobs isn't at Apple, he doesn't have the opportunity or resources to make his vision for the iMac, iBook, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, or iPad a real thing. In fact, he probably wouldn't have had the reason to envision any of the things at NEXT. Also, you could argue that Jobs being at Apple when ARM got good enough for mass market smart gadgets at scale played into it too. If the tech isn't quite there, it doesn't look as interesting at all. Without the right tech being available, Apple stalls out at the iMac and Power Mac and so on and is a profitable computer vendor, but not the most valuable company in the world. So, Tim Cook might not be as visionary, but it might also be a poor time for anyone to be CEO as the opportunities shifted.
  • Tepix 10y ago
    I'm not so sure. Jobs learned at lot at NeXT, I think the next company/product he would have worked on would have gotten it right, even if it hadn't been Apple.
    • programminggeek 10y ago
      Getting it right is not what I'm talking about. I'm saying doing the exact same kind of thing. What if his next company would have been building an online store like Amazon. Does he end up building the iPhone from there? Probably not.
    • smacktoward 10y ago
      I'm not sure he learned much at all. There is a very clear through-line connecting all the Jobsian products: an aggressively streamlined approach to features, a fascination with high-quality materials and novel industrial processes, and an aesthetic sensibility derived from Bauhaus/Functionalism/Dieter Rams. All these elements are just as present in his misses (Lisa, the original Mac, the NeXT Cube, the G4 Cube) as in his hits (iMac, iPod, iPhone). What separates his age of mostly misses from his age of mostly hits isn't any change in his design philosophy; it's the passage of time. His misses mostly came early, his hits late. What this implies to me is that his later success wasn't due to him changing, so much as the world changing around him. In 1984 and 1990 and 1995, he was trying to sell objects d'art into a computing market that was dominated by business/enterprise purchasers, who didn't care if the machines they bought were ugly as sin as long as they were functional and interoperable and cheap. By 2005 the market for tech had shifted away from those buyers into the consumer market, where the priorities were completely different, more like those of the fashion business than of the tech business of old. Suddenly the Jobsian approach stopped being a liability and started being an asset. But that's not because he learned how to aim better, it's because the targets moved so that they were all neatly lined up in front of him.
• throwaway420 10y ago
  It's a little weird for me that a company supposedly in "maintenance mode" has been ignoring the Mac for so long. Even a 5th rate computer company can manage to come out with a new model once in a while. How did Apple get to the point where a company in "maintenance mode" ignores a big product line like this for so long? Is Apple not capable of executing on more than 1 project at once?
  • toyg 10y ago
    > a big product line There's your mistake - next to i-devices, the Mac is simply not a big product line. It's something they need to have around for ecosystem developers, and something of a brand exercise in other sectors. Nothing more.
    • fauigerzigerk 10y ago
      True, but why is that so? Apple wants the high end consumer. Gamers are high end consumers, and yet Apple doesn't sell them high end desktop or laptop machines with gaming capable GPUs. Also no VR/AR gear. This seems like quite a strange omission from their product line.
      • chongli 10y ago
        Gamers are high end consumers They really aren't. PC gamers hang out on Reddit and other forums trading info about how to build a PC from commodity parts in order to get the absolute best price/performance ratio. It's not hard at all to put together a machine for less than a thousand dollars that would be competitive with the machines Apple sells for three thousand. There's no margin for Apple in this space.
        • usaphp 10y ago
          > "It's not hard at all to put together a machine for less than a thousand dollars that would be competitive with the machines Apple sells for three thousand." That's a complete BS, I want you to give me an example of that. Less than a thousand dollar desktop vs 3000$ mac. Now re laptops. My PC friends keep telling me that MacBooks are overpriced And that you can get a faster PC laptop for half the price, but as soon as they start giving me examples like razor blade or some msi laptops, they quickly starting to see that base models of those cost > 1500$ and to get decent specs for gaming you have to shell out upward of 2000$, so in the end you are paying the same money you pay for MacBook.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• cm2187 10y ago
  My opinion is that the failure of Microsoft has less to do with Ballmer than with the absence of a Steve Jobs. My experience with large corporations is that they naturally produce mediocrity. The ownership of the final product or service is too diluted, with too many people involved, pulling in too many conflicting directions. They employ people who individually know what "good" means and what should be done in an ideal world. But that knowledge and common sense gets lost with the bureaucracy and the scale of the organisation. So unless you get someone at the top who will force the company to still achieve something great for their customers, you will end up with an MBA style manager who will make decisions based on options provided by his teams and get products designed based on specs from the top rather than trying to make something great. A great example is Windows 8. I heard Sinofsky had already been sacked by the time he walked on stage to introduce Windows 8. Microsoft knew it was a shit OS, and decided to push it nevertheless. I have seen this happening so many times in other contexts. But tablets are another example. Microsoft knew that tablets would be a big thing well before the introduction of the ipad. In fact I remember a pre-ipad interview of Ballmer where he was deploring that the Windows tablets never took off. The problem was that windows-based tablets were too mediocre to create a market. But Apple is moving in that direction too now. The user experience is deteriorating with every iteration of iOS. I can't think that someone at Apple thinks it's a good user experience to nag their users with all of their services (Apply Pay, iCloud, Apple Music, etc) over and over, with multiple buttons to click to opt out. That will ultimately bite them too. Not overnight, but over 10 years like with Microsoft. Not Tim Cook's fault. That's what large corporations do.
  • the_watcher 10y ago
    > My opinion is that the failure of Microsoft has less to do with Ballmer than with the absence of a Steve Jobs. This argument would be a lot stronger had Microsoft not begun making such major improvements as soon as Ballmer was replaced with Nadella.
    • JustSomeNobody 10y ago
      Have they really, though? I mean, sure, they've got the ole' hype train's pistons pumping and the fanboys woohooing, but they still have produced a version of Windows that is clunky and controversial. They open sourced some stuff, but that's only because they are pushing for the clouds, not some actual change in philosophy. Microsoft's changes are all skin deep.
• alanh 10y ago
  This title really rubs me the wrong way. To say one person “is” someone quite different seems like a reductive and clickbaity way to say that they are alike in one or two small ways. Better title: “Cook, Ballmer, and the Problem with Naming Successors Who Are Good at Execution”
• angularly 10y ago
  Well, it seems Apple are actually increasing R&D in AI: http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/10/17/apples-new-japan-rd-center-to-build-very-different-artificial-intelligence-tech-tim-cook-says http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/10/17/apples-new-japan-r...
• ksec 10y ago
  There are two kinds of people, those who dont understand Apple, and those who Thinks they understand Apple but they dont.
• DubiousPusher 10y ago
  Interesting read. Though, there's something fabulously pretentious about writing an opinion piece and then concluding it with a "Lessons Learned" section.
• erikb 10y ago
  It's also a power game, who gets the next number one spot. People want to have their shot at giving direction to such a big ship. So they make friends with the current boss, ensure loyalty by key employees to themselves, gain authority over important projects. Then you cannot just fire them or put someone else in front of them. I think it's also okay, that companies come and go. If you look at it more closely each company is simply a paper and a bank account. The ideas and people who made the disruptions possible will move on to other paper-account combinations and innovate there.
• Zigurd 10y ago
  I can sort of see the analogy but it does disservice to the way Ballmer led Microsoft to become anti-customer in their promotion of DRM technologies, among other strategic errors. Tim Cook seems genuinely pro-user in his emphasis on privacy.
• jasonsync 10y ago
  Apple does appear to be losing focus. For example: Apple has devalued the PRO moniker under Tim Cook's guidance. By trying to ram it's Mobile OS into a PRO product (iPad PRO). I mean the UI grid is still 4 x 5 on a massive 12 inch display. Nobody noticed it feels more like Fisher Price? And the iPad "PRO" apps are all dumbed down, feature limited versions of actual pro desktop apps. Then, by stagnating a once well regarded PRO product, the Macbook PRO, they further eroded the PRO moniker. Did they delay significant updates to the Macbook PRO to see if existing users would eventually give the iPad PRO a try first? Or did they simply want to drive Desktop OS marketshare back to Windows? And what about the slim Macbook with a fancy new port (USB-C) that's still not available on any other Macbook, even 1.5+ years later!!!? Yes, that's exactly how you devalue the PRO moniker. By releasing new, cutting edge tech on your consumer products first. And then wait years before adding that tech to your PRO line (I know, the new Macbook PRO is rumoured to ONLY have USB-C ... sigh). Don't even get started on the Mac PRO. Ya, that ridiculously underpowered, overpriced PRO computer that you forgot about, that looks like a NYC subway trash can. https://www.google.com/search?q=nyc+subway+trash+can&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=nyc+subway+trash+can&tbm=isc... Talk about an awesome PRO design. Talk about losing focus. Eerily similar to later stage Ballmer Microsoft.
  • alexpersian 10y ago
    The Mac Pro and MacBook Pro are still very capable, solid, and focused machines. Go into any dev shop on the planet and you will see that's true. The only point your comment is right on is the Pro moniker being attached to an iPad.
    • jasonsync 10y ago
      I'm one of those devs and I'm sure every dev shop has been itching for a significant Macbook update for quite some time. Macbook PRO hasn't seen a significant update since 2012. Just minor speed bumps and force touch in 2015. So we're getting one next week - but why not sooner? That was one of the takeaways from this article. Pace of innovation has slowed under Tim Cook.
      • 10y ago
• youdontknowtho 10y ago
  Jesus. Ballmer and Cook have made extreme amounts of money for their shareholders. Major super truckloads of money. That's what businesses do. The meta narrative of disruption is marketing, but somehow everyone keeps talking about it like its real. Even weirder is the emotional responses from some of the other commenters about cloud providers? It's like they are sports teams or something. Just like sports teams they have nothing to do with you, really. It's just a brand that somehow you identify with. (You could carry the sports team metaphor a lot further...tax abatements to build datacenters/arenas...but let's leave it there...)
• robg 10y ago
  He's underestimating their push into medical research and apps. It's $3 Trillion in the U.S. every year and they are further along than any other of the Big Techs. This: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-27/aetna-to-make-apple-watch-available-in-health-monitoring-push https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-27/aetna-to-... Is not about selling more watches and phones. And Aetna alone has 23 million members.
• usaphp 10y ago
  I noticed that Apple lost track of usability since Cook came after their release of a new keyboard at first, new arrows buttons on it are completely unusable, on older keyboards they had spacing between the left/right and buttons on top, now they extended left/right buttons and it makes it incredibly hard to "feel" where they are, and the fact that MacBooks pros still have an old layout makes it a night mare to switch between desktop and laptop programming. Another one is a new lock screen on iOS 10, sometimes the fingerprint does not work or the finger is dirty and i know I want to unlock it with a pin, before I used to be able to just swipe right away and type the pin, now it won't let me and I have to repeatatly press the home button until it figures out that the fingerprint won't work and it has to show me the pin enter screen. Might be little things but it's what used to separate Apple from the crowd, I don't want them to lose focus on those. And don't get me started on the new OS X, which makes my maxed out 2014 rMBP look like slow PC from 2000.
  • SysArchitect 10y ago
    What keyboard has the arrow buttons you are talking about? When I place the wrong finger on my touchID and press the home button once, it shows me the pin entry to get into the phone. No multiple presses, nothing. First bad read, shows the pin entry.
    • usaphp 10y ago
      The new keyboard on macbook and external keyboard has a different layout of arrow keys [1] vs the older macbook pro keyboard [2] [1] - https://www.evernote.com/l/ABV1fPm7JnBO76pqevjy990uALmIK39uZGk https://www.evernote.com/l/ABV1fPm7JnBO76pqevjy990uALmIK39uZ... [2] - https://www.evernote.com/l/ABVer15u9rhODaV3U5QafcRx8eVu3HVq6Io https://www.evernote.com/l/ABVer15u9rhODaV3U5QafcRx8eVu3HVq6... As for the touch ID - try double clicking the home button with a finger that has no touch ID, it does not show a PIN entering screen. I used to double tap all the time before to quicker unlock the phone and swipe to enter a pin, now its' quite annoying and not as fast.
      • SysArchitect 10y ago
• oldmanjay 10y ago
  I'm never impressed with the opinions of people who insist that Microsoft is some sort of failure. The utter lack of incorporating basic observation of reality into these theories is good for people who hate Microsoft, but little else.
• alex- 10y ago
  Their is a feeling that CEOs of these large companies are completely responsible for the direction a company takes. I have never served as a CEO, but I can't help but imagine that large share holders are also very dominant figures. One of the attributes that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates appeared to share (I have never met either) was a massive amount of trust/faith to run their respective companies (eventually). I imagine that this must translate to the board room where they were provided the freedom to pursue avenues that a newly promoted CEO would just not be allowed to do. The author praises Steve Ballmer and Tim Cook for their ability to drive short term growth, but had they failed to do so they may have been replaced by someone more willing to focus on these returns. Eventually as disruption occurs the share holders start to prioritize facing these new challenges.
  • herbturbo 10y ago
    > I imagine that this must translate to the board room where they were provided the freedom to pursue avenues that a newly promoted CEO would just not be allowed to do. The author also mentions Disney, which is a company that was sliding into obscurity until Bob Iger took over. As a newly promoted CEO he executed his vision and put Disney right back on top. I can't imagine Disney's board was particularly forward thinking back then.
    • alex- 10y ago
      You are right, it must be possible to execute on a vision while keeping shareholders, who don't share your vision happy. But I still feel that it must be harder than having carte blanche with the organisation. Maybe I over estimate the different levels of freedom provided to different CEOs. Or maybe the ability to generate this freedom/trust/faith is one of the skills that ultimately helps define a successful CEO.
• heisenbit 10y ago
  It is worth noting that the author has a background in startups and entrepreneurship. Apple however is several magnitudes larger and running new initiatives on startup level requires isolation from the main business and a portfolio approach. Some companies show their their cards, some hint they have a list and Apple is traditionally very secretive. The question is not whether Tim is the right guy for innovation but whether he has put the right guy into the place. John Ivy certainly continues to play a big role but has/is/will there be another internal leader emerging? > About Steve (Blank) > After 21 years in 8 high technology companies, I retired in 1999. I co-founded my last company, E.piphany, in my living room in 1996. My other startups include two semiconductor companies, Zilog and MIPS Computers, a workstation company Convergent Technologies, a consulting stint for a graphics hardware/software spinout Pixar, a supercomputer firm, Ardent, a computer peripheral supplier, SuperMac, a military intelligence systems supplier, ESL and a video game company, Rocket Science Games. > Total score: two large craters (Rocket Science and Ardent), one dot.com bubble home run (E.piphany) and several base hits.
• adekok 10y ago
  Apple bought Siri, and then largely did nothing with it. The founders left, and started another AI startup: Viv. https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/09/siri-creator-shows-off-first-public-demo-of-viv-the-intelligent-interface-for-everything/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/09/siri-creator-shows-off-fir... That AI capability could have been Apples. Instead of concentrating on user experience as a whole, they concentrated on "look and feel" of devices, along with UI. Those are all good things. But having an iPhone with a useful AI would be a killer. Instead, Google is pushing hard in this area. And will likely do well. Because they're a data analysis company. Not a "pretty picture" company.
• dmix 10y ago
  I really like the dichotomy Steve Blank uses between "process" people and "creative" people. I've only been working in tech companies for ~10yrs but all my experience working in companies have shown me that the more a person is obsessed with processes and structure, the less they contribute to the real business value (product, design, marketing, etc). Not only in their own time investment in the company but in their influence on others around them, which tends to be high because they usual get managerial roles somehow. These are the people who obsess over flaws in how work is done rather than the work itself. Which has it's place in larger companies but even there it really needs to be balanced, much more in favour of outward work. Being a front-end dev I've had to work with many 'product managers' who spent a big chunk of their time on the process stuff and most of the product ideas were just shots in the dark without backing it up with data or experience, or otherwise entirely reactionary to local customer issues or the bosses moods, rather than with a strong vision or focusing on high level trends in customer behaviour. Largely, I believe, because they spent a lot of their finite resources focusing on the wrong things (internal optimization rather than external, ie talking to customers, value prop). There are many many traps that startups can fall into and this is a big one. Especially when companies get VC and start adding non-core team members, then feel the need to bring in managers.
• maxxxxx 10y ago
  Ballmer led Microsoft through years of sales and profits increases. Maybe MS isn't "cool" but he certainly left a very solid and profitable company. Being compared to Ballmer is a compliment in my view.
• jamisteven 10y ago
  Their bet is wrong. Ai is definitely the future, but people dont want Ai driving everything they do, people want control, they feel liberated when they can control something so much from ones hands, this is half the reason adoption of smart watches is so small. Its not held in the hand, but worn. The steering and control of a powerful vehicle, boat, car etc, we dont want these things automated. Apple is on the wrong track, I agree with that but dont believe the reason to be a lack of adoption in the Ai arena. Apple's design choices since Jobs checked out have been inferior to its previous conceptions, that will be their downfall, and that has no comparison to Balmer. Another point the author fails to see is that Apple is not so much an innovator as much as they are a good perfectionist. They didnt create the OS, the Smartphone, the Mobile OS, etc. They simply waited for these things to pickup mass user adoption, they looked closed at refining the points that users complained about, then they created their own version of said product, should they choose to go into Ai, this is how it will be done, after the world has spoken its gripes on the current Ai offerings.
• rackforms 10y ago
  There are clearly many holes in Apple's armor these days, but the one that irks me the most is how Apple's literally handing the Education market to Google. I swear if Apple's hardware announcements this week don't include a Chromebook competitor I'm going to figuratively scream. Chromebooks are fantastic products but I grew up in the Microsoft dominated 90's and hated it. It feels like Apple's almost trying to make itself obsolete in markets it once owned. Competition please!
• pducks32 10y ago
  Hey I may be wrong one day and this comment might not age well but I believe what Apple _is_ doing with AI is crucial. Baking privacy into AI and ML is really necessary and I'm happy someone is thinking about it. I think Apple has a lot of AI stuff going on behind closed doors.
• spectrum1234 10y ago
  This is one of the best articles I've read in awhile.
• br3w5 10y ago
  Hasn't Microsoft done the right thing here though as a company for the long-term: visionary CEO leaves meaning potential for great risk to the company > put someone in place who shores up the finances > once finances are in a great position bring a visionary in and change things around again. It reads to me like Microsoft's long-term strategy as a company is actually really good. They must have known they could not continue their dominance but they could continue to be relevant if they had the finances to back it up. Swapping one visionary CEO for another could is a risk because big ideas don't always work (if executed poorly). For any company, a charismatic dominant CEO leaving causes instability a board would be foolish not to try and stabilise things at the company before moving on again. A CEO does not act in isolation even though this article paints it like that and takes guidance from their board.