I've said it before in other posts and I'll repeat myself. Tim Cook is a bean-counter and corporate inertialist, and that's the worst sort of CEO for Apple to have right now.
First, Apple is on the downslope of its product category life cycle, in that the market has matured and the company, while continuing to maintain reasonable profits through high product margin, is nonetheless seeing significant erosion in its market share. This is not strictly Tim Cook's fault, it's a just a function of Apple's combined strategy of hardware exclusivity coupled with the same high product margin, which is fundamentally unjustifiable in the long-term given the specs of the provided hardware. A lot of people try to evoke a claim of culture premium by comparing Apple to Ferrari or Rolex, but it's just absolutely false. Neither Ferrari or Rolex have an ecosystem reliant on third parties for proliferation like Apple. Apple's draw is its ecosystem, the number and quality of the apps available for it, especially for its mobile solutions. Eroding marketshare fu
Second, for people that say we should trust Jobs because he hand-picked a successor, I counter with the fact that, for all of his charisma and his great ability to innovate and develop markets before they enter common awareness, Steve Jobs historically made some poor business decisions about who to trust with stewardship of his company. Add into that his mercurial conception of loyalty and his ability to appear friendly with people that he personally despised, and it would not shock me at all that Tim's direct selection by Jobs was merely a public confidence PR ploy, with Jobs merely pragmatically choosing not to rock the boat when the board selected someone that would have the bottom line, and the bottom line only, at heart. I freely admit that this is purely speculation on my part, but he historically prefer engaging, dynamic people for CEO spots rather than engineers. I also think back to the All Things D roundtable with he and Bill Gates, loaded with false civility when they were well-known to detest each other, and then we find out later that Microsoft licensed a load of Apple IP for its own mobile solutions. Perhaps a coincidence and perhaps not.
As a shareholder of Apple stock for many years, and one that believes that company itself is grossly overvalued when compared to the product it delivers, I'm really rather disappointed that Cook hasn't taken the opportunity to have the technical proficiency of its products rise to the level of its fit and finish, given his engineering background. As a long-time consumer of Apple products (my first computer, 26 years ago, was an Apple IIgs), I'm somewhat alarmed by the general direction of emphasis on cosmetic changes on the software side, and costly niche interfaces on the hardware side, all against the backdrop of an increasingly deteriorating economic environment.
