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I agree that Tim Cook is an advantage to Apple. I disagree that he is really "new." Tim has been at Apple since 1998 and has been in a place of power since at l

by ansy 15y ago

I agree that Tim Cook is an advantage to Apple. I disagree that he is really "new." Tim has been at Apple since 1998 and has been in a place of power since at least 2004 when he took over for Steve Jobs as CEO the first time. Tim has been part of the winning formula for the better part of a decade. I think the glaring omission in Gruber's article, though, is Apple's lost advantage in Steve Jobs. It could be argued in the 11 years Steve Jobs was away from Apple that Mac hardware and software more or less coasted in terms of innovation. The simple unibody design splintered into a dozen different beige boxes stacked on top of each other shortly after Job's departure in 1985. Mac OS gained color, cooperative threading, and a few peripheral updates until Steve Jobs came back in 1996. I'm not saying it was worse. I'm just saying it was uninspired incremental refinement. The design language at Apple didn't change from the day he left in 1985 until he finally came back in 1996. And almost immediately after Steve comes back we've got OS 8 with its first UI facelift in years. System 9 quickly led into OS X. On the hardware front we got the bondi blue iMac. Then the iPod. Then the desk lamp-esque iMac G4. Not to mention the short lived G4 cube. Apple was alive again. Now that Steve's involvement has once again diminished, what will Apple look like over the next decade? Will iOS 9 look that much different from iOS 5? Will the MacBook Pro evolve beyond a giant sized MacBook Air? Will Apple successfully branch out beyond phones, tablets and computers? Tim Cook will keep Apple in fine shape. Apple will at worst be like Dell in its heyday. Delivering products people want at prices nobody could compete against, disrupting the traditional manufacturing process. But will Apple continue to successfully innovate? Companies tend to change to reflect the current leadership. HP was once a company that Steve Wozniak wanted to work at forever. In less than a decade after the founders were gone the the HP Way was gone and the company was never the same. EDIT: I want to add this is mostly a counterpoint to Gruber who is clearly trying to diminish Jobs and glorify Cook. His brief treatment of the subject is to say Jobs brings "beautiful, elegant, innovative, and fun" before seemingly dismissing Jobs as merely a designer whose designs are something that get copied by other firms anyway therefore implying he is not a real competitive advantage unlike the "can't-be-copied" Cook operational competitive advantage.

mechanical_fish 15y ago
Have we forgotten the Newton? The Newton had issues, but lack of daring design innovation wasn't one of them. Now that Palm has boomed and iPads and iPhones are everywhere, it's difficult to appreciate how crazy the Newton was at the time. People didn't know that mobile book-sized computers were the future. The Newton was a bit too futuristic, too ambitious for its own hardware. Apple also tried a bunch of things in the OS space before NeXT and Jobs rode to the rescue. They just didn't succeed. Which brings this right back to Tim Cook, and the unsung operational heroes that really built Apple: It isn't that Apple didn't try to innovate in the Jobs-free interregnum. They just didn't succeed. It takes more than just good intentions and "vision": It takes operational skill.
- felipemnoa 15y ago
  OK, so if a Formula 1 driver wins the race, who gets the credit? The car or the driver? I would say the car is Tim Cook and Steve jobs is the driver.
  - dasil003 15y ago
    That's a terrible analogy. There is not just one person making human decisions in Apple. Jobs deserves a lot of credit, but there are hundreds (if not thousands) of people doing the critical design work that make Apple products great. It's easy to sit on the outside and imagine that Apple doesn't have a decision-maker to equal Jobs, but only time will tell.
    - felipemnoa 15y ago
      >>Jobs deserves a lot of credit, but there are hundreds (if not thousands) of people doing the critical design work that make Apple products great You could say the same about the car-driver relationship. "The driver deservers a lot of credit but the car has hundreds (if not thousands) of parts doing the critical work of moving the car forward" Or you could substitute parts with designers. Keep in mind that Steve Jobs chose Tim Cook and Tim Cook worked only with the approval of Steve Jobs. Had Tim Cook not performed (just like the car) be assured that he would have been replaced by a better person (car)? This in no way diminishes the person (car) but notice that the main person doing the decisions is Steve Jobs (The driver). Had Apple failed everybody would have blamed Steve Jobs not Tim Cook, so I don't understand the double standard.
pkamb 15y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Ive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Ive
bluekeybox 15y ago
> I disagree that [Tim Cook] is really "new." I believe Gruber's argument was not that Tim Cook has more influence than he did before, but that because Apple is much more mainstream today than it was a few years back, its operations are larger in scale and logistics become increasingly important as the company pushes millions of products. Better logistics pipeline allows Apple to compete on price, which is impressive considering that Apple has always been perceived as a premium brand.

by ansy 15y ago

mechanical_fish 15y ago

Have we forgotten the Newton? The Newton had issues, but lack of daring design innovation wasn't one of them. Now that Palm has boomed and iPads and iPhones are everywhere, it's difficult to appreciate how crazy the Newton was at the time. People didn't know that mobile book-sized computers were the future. The Newton was a bit too futuristic, too ambitious for its own hardware. Apple also tried a bunch of things in the OS space before NeXT and Jobs rode to the rescue. They just didn't succeed. Which brings this right back to Tim Cook, and the unsung operational heroes that really built Apple: It isn't that Apple didn't try to innovate in the Jobs-free interregnum. They just didn't succeed. It takes more than just good intentions and "vision": It takes operational skill.

felipemnoa 15y ago
OK, so if a Formula 1 driver wins the race, who gets the credit? The car or the driver? I would say the car is Tim Cook and Steve jobs is the driver.
- dasil003 15y ago
  That's a terrible analogy. There is not just one person making human decisions in Apple. Jobs deserves a lot of credit, but there are hundreds (if not thousands) of people doing the critical design work that make Apple products great. It's easy to sit on the outside and imagine that Apple doesn't have a decision-maker to equal Jobs, but only time will tell.
  - felipemnoa 15y ago
    >>Jobs deserves a lot of credit, but there are hundreds (if not thousands) of people doing the critical design work that make Apple products great You could say the same about the car-driver relationship. "The driver deservers a lot of credit but the car has hundreds (if not thousands) of parts doing the critical work of moving the car forward" Or you could substitute parts with designers. Keep in mind that Steve Jobs chose Tim Cook and Tim Cook worked only with the approval of Steve Jobs. Had Tim Cook not performed (just like the car) be assured that he would have been replaced by a better person (car)? This in no way diminishes the person (car) but notice that the main person doing the decisions is Steve Jobs (The driver). Had Apple failed everybody would have blamed Steve Jobs not Tim Cook, so I don't understand the double standard.

pkamb 15y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Ive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Ive

bluekeybox 15y ago

> I disagree that [Tim Cook] is really "new." I believe Gruber's argument was not that Tim Cook has more influence than he did before, but that because Apple is much more mainstream today than it was a few years back, its operations are larger in scale and logistics become increasingly important as the company pushes millions of products. Better logistics pipeline allows Apple to compete on price, which is impressive considering that Apple has always been perceived as a premium brand.