| Cook was an excellent XO who made all the Jobs-induced innovations practical. Which was an immense job. Supply chain management at global scale is phenomenally challenging. Cook seems to be a very competent bean counter. He lacks the charisma and the "one more thing" that Jobs had, but he has done an incredibly impressive job of turning Apple into one of the planet's biggest money making machines. Apple is now a movie studio, a music distribution company that makes its own hardware, a software marketplace, one of the world's biggest consumer hardware companies, and a legendary brand. Someone less competent wouldn't have kept all those plates spinning. The cost has been an outbreak of blandness. Jobs was primarily a narcissist who enjoyed pushing others because it made him feel better about himself. But he also had a genuine passion for creativity, aesthetics, and the future. Cook lacks those qualities. He's the ultimate perfected FAANG company man. There's nothing cool about him. This has affected the products, which are good enough to very good, but not inspiring. It's impossible to know what Jobs would have done, or if there was even room for game changing new products. We know VR is on its way, and Car has been happening for a while. But neither of those is truly a game changer. (VR might be, but it could also fail badly.) So I suspect this is a hint of frustration from the Board, who are happy to count their money, but are also missing that One More Thing that will be Insanely Great. |
Under Cook, Apple launched the Apple Watch, AirPods, Apple TV, and their HomeKit platform, and each of those products are massive businesses. Their online services (which frankly languished under Jobs) has grown by nearly 20x. They brought a custom CPU to Macs, to wild acclaim.
> So I suspect this is a hint of frustration from the Board, who are happy to count their money, but are also missing that One More Thing that will be Insanely Great.
I think it's more Cook having some humility. The share price in the last year is down 22% (it's still performing incredibly well considering the hammering the tech sector has taken).
I'm not saying Jobs didn't have merits, but I've studied the company for decades. I've read the Jobs biography. He was passionate and driven, but a lot of what he accomplished was from being in the right place at the right time, having the right friends, calling in favors, and taking credit for other people's work. In many ways he was an absolute monster, and I would argue Apple succeeded as much in spite of him as because of him. It certainly hasn't missed a beat in his absence, and to say the products post-Jobs have been bland is a subjective stretch.