Yes Jobs handpicked Scully and his pitch to him were "Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?"No. Jobs didn’t hand pick Sculley. His board forced him to pick a “pro” CEO
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The proper comparison to Tim Cook isn’t Steve Jobs but Steve Ballmer instead. There will only be one Bill Gates and there was only one Steve Jobs. Arguably Cook is doing a better job than Ballmer did.
and he did it for good reasons like the board wanting "seasoned leadership" on the economic side of things. Turned out to he was a beancounting marketeer with no vision, big surprise there lol.
And Steve Ballmer really is a great comparison to John Scully, they both took over companies with an incredible momentum and market position, they are both without vision and they are both leaving or going to leave flailing companies behind running on hot steam. All they understand is beans, the rest is just a dog and pony show.
Steve Jobs:
When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back
And that's exactly what Apple has been doing for a while now, little pieces of plywood everywhere and products that goes nowhere. You mention the watch and it's a good example of a product under Cook, very nicely polished surface but underneath it's a different story of a processor with no battery running an OS glued together from unseemly parts of dubious origin.