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Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple (2016)
- dang 8y agoDiscussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12778470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12778470
- empath75 8y agoThe stock is up around 100% since he posted this fwiw.
- ramenmeal 8y agoIf you ignore the dot com bubble around 2000, Microsoft's stock rose quite a bit under Ballmer, didn't it?
- kevingadd 8y agoStock prices are about whether investors are happy, not about whether the company is actually doing well.
- jonknee 8y ago... Guess what makes investors happy?
- ArchTypical 8y agoProfits. Liquidating MS holdings would also increase profits for a short term gain.
- jonknee 8y agoActually if Microsoft liquidated its holdings its stock would drop like a rock... Investors know how compounding works and put a high price on growth, if you send the message that there is no future growth you suddenly are valued at what's in the bank.
- SpikeDad 8y agoThis is old and nonsense. It highlights correctly the upcoming AI revolution but it misses entirely the point that Apple is innovating in this space - processing on the phone rather than within Google or Amazon verse. In other words Apple is simultaneously building an on phone AI while at the same time retaining it's mission of privacy for the user. I'll take the little hit on functionality in exchange for a massive upgrade in privacy. So in the end Tim Cook is carrying on the customer and privacy centric DNA that Jobs imbued into Apple using innovation that other companies just dream about.
- sdegutis 8y agoI don't think most casual iPhone users are going to see privacy as a primary feature to look for, but it is extremely frustrating that half the time I try to use Siri for basic things like "call my wife", it just spins and spins and I eventually give up and find the Phone app and click the dang call button myself. I know that's caused by the server because sometimes it times out after like 60 seconds and says something about how Siri services are busy, please try again.
- QasimK 8y agoSo you're saying if you can't sell the local-data-processing feature as "privacy-preserving", then you can try to sell it as "it'll work without an internet connection" - tunnels, trains, planes, cars, hiking, underground, deep-inside buildings, power-loss, or many other situations that you don't have WiFi nor 4G.
- rayiner 8y agoIt’s not just about privacy. Having to go over the Net to process simple voice commands makes Siri almost useless. After a few times of giving a command to Siri, only to be confronted with a long delay or an outright error because you’re driving, or in an elevator, or under a bridge, or whatever, it stops being a tool you reach for instinctively.
- hndamien 8y ago
- sdegutis 8y ago> "But Google and Amazon are betting that the next of wave of computing products will be AI-directed services" That seems like a stretch of a conclusion. Amazon has been excelling at cutting out the middleman and reducing costs that are unnecessary in an internet-centric age. Alexa feels like an experiment to see if they can make that even simpler, while cashing in on the IoT fad. Slight nit pick, using underline for emphasis doesn't work well on the web, it just makes it look like a link.
- oflannabhra 8y ago>The problem is that a supply chain CEO who lacks a passion for products and has yet to articulate a personal vision of where to Apple will go is ill equipped to make the right organizational, business model and product bets to bring those to market. The author makes the argument that because Tim Cook does not demo new products, Apple is incapable of innovating, and is just cruising on the goodwill of the brand. What a crock. Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs, and Apple is most definitely different without Steve. But, under Cook the following has happened: Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod, iPhone X, ARKit, Siri Shortcuts, FaceID, iMac Pro. Everything in that list might not perfectly suit every user, but the argument "Without Steve Apple can't innovate!" totally falls over. Steve gets a lot of attention for his innate sixth sense for product, his masterful presentations, and more. But, I think this era of Apple proves that he was also great at creating a culture and ecosystem that can perpetuate without his presence.
- travbrack 8y agoHomepod and Siri are like the Zune and Windows phone when compared to Alexa/Echo.
- brandoncordell 8y agoFrom what I've heard the Homepod had an amazing speaker but it was paired with a second-rate assistant (Siri) while most people that buy Alexa products care more about the assistant than it's included speaker.
- maxxxxx 8y agoI don't get why Ballmer is viewed as a failure. He steadily increased revenues and income under his watch. Maybe he didn't have the "vision" thing but he was a damn good CEO if you accept that a CEO's job is to grow the company.
- ProAm 8y agoBecause Microsoft is a tier 2 company these days when they used to rule almost the entire computing world with an overwhelming marketshare.
- jonknee 8y agoPerhaps they are on HN, but Microsoft is the third most valuable publicly traded company in the world (behind Apple and Amazon).
- ProAm 8y agoThey are clearly still worth a bucket of money (and still make a lot of money), I was more speaking towards technology, market capture, buzz worthy. From where they were when Ballmer took over to where they are now they are a relatively second tier company. They are playing catch up and no one looks forward to using their products.
- Apocryphon 8y agoI think it's more like morale was low within the company due to stack ranking and other bad management practices. But then we regularly hear about atrocious working conditions at Amazon, for both their fulfillment center employees and their corporate workers, while Bezos is viewed as a visionary.
- blihp 8y agoHe was great at maximizing revenue and profit on the current thing but absolutely terrible at positioning them for the next thing. The problem in tech is that the next thing is often your cash cow 5-10 years out. Name pretty much any major tech trend that took off during Ballmer's tenure and look at how well Microsoft was able to capitalize on it. (think MP3 players, phones, tablets, search, social, web apps, cloud services, browsers, etc). His stated strategy was 'fast follower' and we saw how well that worked out. Microsoft has become IBM in that they are mostly legacy tech now and virtually no startups use their stuff in a significant way which doesn't bode well for where they'll be when the windows/office gravy train stops rolling. Their new CEO has been working hard to fix things (they're no longer a complete embarassment with browsers and cloud services, for example) but Ballmer left them in a pretty inexcusable position given the resources he had at his disposal. I actually think the Cook/Ballmer comparison is apropos as I see a lot of similarities going on. It's not about where the company is today, it's where the company is likely to be 10 years from now.
- nicodjimenez 8y agoSteve Blank is amazing at short form business writing. Very insightful. Of course the iPhone will continue to sell well in the short term, but the trillion dollar market cap is a consequence of what Steve jobs was doing ten years ago. If Steve Jobs were alive now, he'd be working on something totally different. We'all never know!
- gxs 8y agoIt's understood that, to paraphrase Steve, life must goes and make way for the new, but it really bums me out that we'll never know what new thing he might have done.
- nicodjimenez 8y agoWe can speculate. In the device space, the trend seems to be special purpose devices - vs a single device that's only OK at everything. How exactly that would have been carried out by Steve, we'll never know.
- IBM 8y agoCounterpoint: “We’re thrilled Apple Watch has become an essential part of people's lives,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer. “The completely redesigned Apple Watch Series 4 continues to be an indispensable communication and fitness companion, and now with the addition of groundbreaking features, like fall detection and the first-ever ECG app offered directly to consumers, it also becomes an intelligent guardian for your health.” https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/09/redesigned-apple-watch-series-4-revolutionizes-communication-fitness-and-health/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/09/redesigned-apple-watc...
- torstenvl 8y agoOnly if you stretch the word "indispensable" to mean "kinda cool but completely unnecessary."
- IBM 8y agoIn a few years doctors will be prescribing Apple Watches to patients and it will be reimbursed by health insurers. #TimeStamp
- Bud 8y agoMore like a few months, I would say. Some insurers were already giving credits for the last version of the Apple Watch, because it encourages exercise so much.
- torstenvl 8y agoYeah. And that's kinda cool. But I don't think it renders it "absolutely necessary; all-important; imperative; invaluable." Antibiotics are indispensable. An EKG on your wrist is a nice-to-have.
- gesman 8y agoThis is BS. Ballmer was a worst thing that could happen to any company of a Microsoft scale. Under his guidance Microsoft stock stalled in a trading range for more than a decade, he was always late to any big game and had that "me too!" laggard strategy for the biggest innovations (cloud, search, mobile) thinking he can buy his way ahead to compensate for the lack of vision and boneheadedness. It was funny watching MSFT stock to suddenly pop up 8-10% at a slightest rumor of Bill Gates returning. Tim Cook is nothing like that. He may not be Steve Jobs, but he is not screwing AAPL either.
- zeroname 8y agoLooking at stock price is a poor indicator of performance, it's too tied to market sentiment. Remember when Elon Musk smoked that joint and Tesla stock took a 10% hit? It's all nonsense. Look at revenue, look at earnings per share. Steady growth for Ballmer across his tenure. He did a good job.
- gesman 8y agoAs a shareholder (disclaimer: i am not) I'd rather have stock rising with bad numbers than stock stalled with good numbers. Having said that, my hands are itching to (disclaimer: i am not financial adviser) buy leap puts on TSLA.
- zeroname 8y agoThat's because you'd rather reap the benefits of market irrationality than solid business fundamentals. Admittedly, that attitude has worked well in the past ahem fifteen years. The thing with irrationality is that it's hard to predict. The people that make the right bet get hailed as genius visionaries, the losers are simply forgotten. A good CEO is not a gambler, they're consistent and they can execute, but alas that's not good material to dramatize in the media.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoI remember reading this in 2016 during 'peak skepticism' on whether or not Tim Cook could ever fill the shoes of Steve Jobs and the author, Steve Blank, makes a lot of really good points (mostly how you can see Ballmer as an excellent CEO if you set the metrics to do so). It reminded me once again of how what you believe gives color to the narrative you're trying to communicate. More importantly, what the reader believes also colors the narrative and sometimes it wasn't exactly what the author intended. I resonate strongly with the notion that there are good times and 'late' times to innovate. I also agree strongly that it takes someone who is taking a wider and longer view of the situation to be good a calling the shots on that. But it is also quite important to be able to turn those opportunities into products and learn from that effort to really ride the 'change' (what ever it is) into a leadership and profitable position. When I read this in 2016 I was not convinced that "AI" was the big innovation it was being hyped to be, however since that time I've come to a different conclusion. While I still think "AI" is hype, I see the ability to use machine learning algorithms to take the digital exhaust of a system and post process it into an algorithm for anticipating the outputs of that process to be quite powerful, and is having an impact on a lot of systems today. I see the work that Apple has done to improve the efficiency of the A12X SoC, which was announced today, for executing algorithms based on machine learning to be pretty innovative. In 2016 machine learning was still 'party trick' status as far as I was concerned but here in 2018 it is looking more and more like 'core thing all computer systems will do'. As a result I'm willing to give Tim Cook more innovator points than Steve Blank was willing to do back in 2016. (misc: I love how the user handle 'IBM' posted this)
- thewarrior 8y agoI see the ability to use machine learning algorithms to take the digital exhaust of a system and post process it into an algorithm for anticipating the outputs of that process to be quite powerful, and is having an impact on a lot of systems today. Could you elaborate on that ? What does that mean ?
- ChuckMcM 8y agoSure, here is a trivial example of the concept. Let's say you have a system of comments like you do here on HN with upvotes and users and topics. Let's pretend that system just runs "open loop" as it were and things are posted and up voted and down voted and commented on. The operation of the system leaves behind a trail of its activity (some explicit like new comments, some implicit like karma changes). Collectively this data set is the "exhaust" or "wake" (in the sense of a boat wake that shows up when a boat passes by) of the system running. A machine learning system can process that data set and make predictions about future behavior of the system. People do this all the time to predict things like "when is the best time to post" "what happens when something makes the front page" etc. Internally predictions can be made about vote fraud or spam or what have you. You can use machine learning in an active feedback mode where its predictive outputs can then be tied to administrative controls to achieve a desired improvement. Let's say you wanted to remove the 'front page bias' of articles posted at a particular time. If you have a tool for boosting or demoting stories in a fairly fine grained way, and you can deduce the natural tendency of stories based on submission time to reach the front page, you can have your code 'boost' stories that are submitted during "weak" times and 'attenuate' stories that are submitted during "strong" times. The effect on the system is surfacing a wider variety of stories and a better user experience (for readers at least). At the meta level, this is no different than control system theory with an error amplifier and a summation amplifier tied into a feedback loop. But Machine Learning brings with it the ability to characterize, and base feedback on, variables that aren't really visible to people nor completely independent. Coding the variables, their interrelationships and their impact on the output is a time consuming and non-economic thing to do, so it isn't done. But with machine learning, the ability to do that analysis algorithmically and just train for the outputs of interest, is quite inexpensive. Makes it a very powerful hammer in everything from language translation to truck load planning to autonomous driving.
- zeroname 8y ago"In 2014, Microsoft finally announced that Ballmer would retire, and in early 2014, Satya Nadella took charge. Nadella got Microsoft organized around mobile and the cloud (Azure), freed the Office and Azure teams from Windows, killed the phone business and got a major release of Windows out without the usual trauma. And is moving the company into augmented reality and conversational AI." Okay, but: - Microsoft is still irrelevant on mobile - Azure already was four years old when Nadella took charge - Windows 10 was not actually well-received - Microsoft is irrelevant in Augmented Reality and conversational AI, which are already by themselves not that relevant Microsoft can't be Apple because Microsoft is uncool. It always will be uncool. It can't do the transformation to a fashion brand like Apple. I'll make another prediction: The days of "revolutionary" consumer products are over. People won't be living in VR/AR, they'll keep watching stuff on their phone/tablets/TVs. There will be more innovation in B2B and Microsoft is actually in a better position here in the long run.
- abakker 8y agoPrediction noted. Per AR, I suppose hololens doesn't count? It sure felt like a step in the right direction when I used it. Honestly, the least cool thing MSFT makes is Sharepoint. They need to just abandon that line of thinking, and think of something else. Compared to the rest of new MSFT, that whole product needs a drastic upgrade, not just the Teams UI. They missed an opportunity in workplace tech when they bought Yammer and Skype and just sat on them. Maybe they'll get another shot.
- zeroname 8y agoHololens, Magic Leap, Google Glass, all of these will not become "must have" consumer devices. Reality is already augmented. Need more information than what your bare eyes can see? Pull out your phone. You don't need it overlaid unto your vision. That's a gimmick.
- abakker 8y agoFunny - I once gave a presentation where I made the claim that the most common Augmented Reality app used was spoken car navigation. Augmented Reality certainly doesn't augment only your eyes. I also think the Apple Watch haptic system is underutilized as a augmentation device. Total agreement.
- dmode 8y agoThe way I see it is that in the Tim Cook era, Apple releases good, solid products. And I buy them religiously. But they don't really make great, exciting, ground breaking products anymore (perhaps Face Id is the exception). I wasn't really waiting in anticipation for today's iPhone launch as I knew it will be a solid, well built phone, with a few incremental improvements.