Companies as large as apple do not need to have one man that does absolutely everything..This a company that does 175 billion of revenue with just a few products..Someone has to manage the workings of the company, the logistics around it. Creativity can be centered around the leadership that only does that..
Of course and every announcement Apple would make with Steve Jobs you would see Steve go out of his way to mention the fact that it was the fantastic work done by the engineers, programmers etc. that made it all possible. Honestly I swear most of the people here must have been asleep during these keynote addresses given that it was such an obvious habit of his.
Really not much of a shocker. He is more focused on the business side and less on what makes Macs "Macs." Watch the Ballmerization of Apple continue.
Oh please, Ballmer doubled the size of Microsoft with the place where they lost it was in the consumer space but that has more to do with the lack of willingness to change the company culture rather than being a bad management per se - a person being in a culture for years unable to identify the problems that outsiders can see easily, the stack ranking being the best example of talent destruction and the promotion of petty infighting for the sake of climbing the greasy pole of power and prestige. Apple doesn't suffer from any of those problems and has an entirely different culture - give this "Apple is doomed" rhetoric a rest. It wasn't funny 10+ years ago and it isn't funny today.
As long as Cook allows the people who work for him to be focused on that why does it matter if he's more focused on the business side of things. I'd like someone to name one great product or idea that Cook stopped from happening because of his alleged "bean counter" mentality.
Of course but then again we have people re-writing history whilst ignoring all the major cockups by Steve such as the Cube or the reliance for took long of giving Motorola and IBM a second, third and forth chance to get their act together. By the way in which people talk about Steve's Job as the CEO you'd think he didn't make a single mistake and since Tim Cook took over it has been wall to wall failure left, right and centre.
Oh, and btw Rogifan, Woz never said to make an Android phone - how about keeping up with the news instead of repeating the now debunked selective quoting a media outlet made on what Woz actually said.
I agree with robertcoogan. For all his anti-Jobs qualities, one thing that Cook absolutely needs for Apple to continue to grow is an acuity on how technology is evolving and where it's heading. Somehow it doesn't feel like iWatch is 'it'.
The iWatch is a fad and god knows why people (analysts and fanboys alike) keep bringing it up as some sort of game changer because it isn't. The big move in the future is cloud, on demand services and that is where the Apple TV fits into the equation but the question is whether the infrastructure is going to be there in the majority of the markets that Apple serves such as high speed unmetered connections that enable people to stream movies on demand without buffering, that the content creators wake up and realise that having three or four middle men before the product gets to the customer isn't in their best interest and that they're better off bypassing the cable companies and other media networks in favour of directly selling to consumers via Apple or some other service.
I will agree that Cook is no Steve Jobs. But Cook didn't preside over a huge company that missed mobile - entirely - and has thereby condemned it to the imminent major-also-ran status that IBM now enjoys.
What I'm really surprised about is how Microsoft missed the opportunity even when purely looking at it from a enterprise perspective I find it confusing how they avoided such an opportunity right from the outset. Then again when you have 'stack ranking' that pits employees against each other to the point they spend half their time trying to cover their backsides, make others look bad etc. just to keep their job then there is very little time left for actually coming up with creative and new ideas.
