Comments on: Tim Cook’s Apple: the one Apple story to read today

By: edanderson

edanderson — Sun, 27 May 2012 23:29:36 +0000

I wonder why no one ever questions the pervasive view that Jobs’ passing was the end of Apple. Have you ever known anyone with Pancreatic cance, and had to have chemo and radiation treatments….and took two years off separately to recover. And everyone buys the argument that Jobs was intimately involved with all product ideas since his cancer turned bad in 2005? Newsflash, chemo and radiation are completely debilitating. I suspect Tim Cook has been somewhat selfless not taking credit for much if any of Apple’s success the last 4-5 years. I for one don’t buy arm chair journalists who purport to know everything.

By: DanoX

DanoX — Fri, 25 May 2012 16:59:20 +0000

MBA’S, Lawyers, Accountants, Marketeers, Salesman, and Bankers, are fine for short term advice, but running (power to make decisions on the ultimate design) in a Design-Engineering, Technical, Software Design, Pharmaceutical, Car manufacturing company will lead to the downfall of the company, Schiller or anyone like him should never ever be CEO at Apple. Apple had 12 years with MBA’S, Sales, and Marketing people running the company it can’t work (i.e. HP in the last 12 years). Jon Ivie and Scot Forsall and people like them are by far the most important resource at a tech company. Look at what the school systems are pumping out in this country, MBA’S, Lawyers, Accountants, Marketeers, Salesman, and Bankers none of them build anything, there is a reason Germany is still doing well in comparison to some of the other European countries they still design and build things.

By: Chuck Burnstagger

Chuck Burnstagger — Fri, 25 May 2012 08:48:14 +0000

The destruction of Apple has begun. Cook is another John Sculley. Goodbye Apple.

By: cheese

cheese — Fri, 25 May 2012 05:19:46 +0000

It makes no sense to pass judgment (or allude to it) on Tim Cook just yet.

He needs to cut his teeth with a first product launch of his own – I mean a brand new product and not a iPhone++ or a iPad++ – Apple is famous for making new products that delight customers and not for having friends in the wall street or at DC. And making new products takes time. I would give Tim that time and wait for the next fab product from Apple. Till then, he can eat with who he wants and be the friendliest CEO ever – but all that simply doesn’t count. Roll out the innovation, that’s what we are waiting for.

By: eideard

eideard — Thu, 24 May 2012 20:17:46 +0000

Unfortunately, and as expected, lots of comments from folks who know zip about MBA’s, business, engineering or design. Reading magazine articles about Apple for years does not make you an expert in any of these. Damned few of those articles are written by anyone expert in any of those fields either.

Lashinsky is good and I’d give him a B for the article – only because a small piece of it is wasting time on crystall ball predictions even if he uses quotes from “a former long-time engineer” – which is meaningless except for illustrating a conclusion based on that crystal ball.

By: Steve K

Steve K — Thu, 24 May 2012 19:30:37 +0000

The reason Steve got booted in the first place was for mucking up the operational side of things. If he’d just stuck to being a figurehead and keeping the product development folks focused, things would have been fine. All the great ideas in the world are useless if you can’t execute them. Which is where Apple’s resurgence and ridiculous profits come from. As long as Cook stays out of Ive’s way (and that culture is pretty well established) they should be fine for quite awhile.
Just being an iconoclast for it’s own sake means nothing. Only if you are actually moving something forward is it useful at all. And it’s entirely possible to move things forward without all the needless, non-value-added struggle. In fact you get more, sooner, for less. Win-win.

By: Rich

Rich — Thu, 24 May 2012 19:18:40 +0000

I don’t have a very good impression of MBAs, either.

By: Alex Lowe

Alex Lowe — Thu, 24 May 2012 19:11:31 +0000

“But it’s still too soon to tell if either of those things will do what many fear: transform Apple into an ordinary company.”

I’m calling it. Apple is going to be an ordinary company soon. They’ll have bad quarters, because their competitors will not always be so incompetent. The difference is that with Jobs at the helm, Apple would meet its challenges by courting brilliant engineers and coming up with the next big daring idea. Under Cook, when push comes to shove, Apple will succumb to Wall-Street’s conservative instincts and the brand will collapse.

What did he do with Apple’s war chest? Buy a whole array of awesome startups to blow everyone out of the water with? No, he bought…wait for it… a stock buy-back program and dividends. How inspired. Warp speed, here we come.

By: Bruce Bebow

Bruce Bebow — Thu, 24 May 2012 19:03:23 +0000

Hear, hear!

By: Steve K

Steve K — Thu, 24 May 2012 18:00:16 +0000

Goes to show that you can run a company with both innovation and execution without being a megalomaniac tyrant. As Mark Twain said” We should get all the knowledge that is in a thing, but only the knowledge that is actually in it. Lest we be like the cat that jumps on a hot stove. She will never jump on a hot stove again, but nor will she jump on a cold one either.”

So many people canonize Jobs and try to emulate him without separating the effective parts from the counterproductive parts. The next great leader will be the one who recognizes the differences, utilizes what is effective and improves on what wasn’t.