Yes.When Tim Cook took over the reins he inherited a company with cash reserves rivalling the economies of many countries and 3 cash cow products.Its not hard to maintain a trend with near infinite cash
On the other hand STARTING a trend is a difficult job.Something Tim Cook failed at and Steve Jobs excelled at.Jobs wouldn't waste his time with Teletubbies Emojis and fashion bands at presentations.His inventions moved the world
This.
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Lesson from history:
Apple had a big seller with the iPod & iTunes. However, by ~2005 it was obvious that more and more phones were coming out with half-decent music player features, and other sources of legal music downloads were appearing and that, eventually, that was going to decimate the dedicated music player market. However, iPod sales
continued to grow and didn't peak until 2009, so Apple could have said "look, iPod sales are still rising, aren't we clever! (Oh, and we tried licensing iTunes to Motorola and it was crap - so people don't want music phones)"
Instead, they were developing the iPhone - so when it launched in 2007, iTunes was still a hot property and a Unique Selling Point of the phone, and when iPod sales actually started to tank a couple of years later, the iPhone was well established and over its teething troubles - plus they had the iPad coming out to open up a new growth market,
So, now, its been obvious for the last 4-5 years that (a) the mobile market is reaching saturation and people aren't upgrading every year and (b) Samsung, Google et. al. have got past copying the iPhone and are producing serious competition. If Apple were going to pull a rabbit out of the hat they should have done it 2-3 years ago so that now, when the prophecies are actually becoming true, the new product was up and running and over the V1.0 blues.
Instead we have the Watch (see previous post) which, whatever its other strengths and failings,
is completely dependent on having an iPhone so if iPhone sales tank they'll take the watch with it. C.f. the iPhone and the iPad (apart from the very early 'Steve's hobby' version) which actually pulled people in to Apple. The Watch 2
has to have Android support.
The only question is, would Jobs have done any better? We don't know, but we do have past performance: he hit home runs with the original Mac, the original iMac, the Intel Mac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Where would you put your money?
Well said.
The problem I am seeing with Cook - aside from his completely misplaced political and charitable efforts - is that he lacks the foresight that Steve had regarding market direction. Steve, depending on which of his circle you talk to, had an uncanny knack either for knowing where the market was going, or for creating the market in the first place.
For example, the iPod was a response to not just crappy music players but a crappy user experience, coupled with the idea that there was a much easier way to distribute music. No one else had figured out those three leaves on the clover. Which of course led to the fourth leaf of Apple changing the world yet again and going further up the market ladder.
The iPhone v1.0 looks quaint and almost clunky now, but if you watch the video of the big reveal, you can pick up from the crowd just why it took off. There were good phones out prior to the iPhone, but none had all the features of the iPhone. Their net interface was abysmal, voice mail was a pain to use, and those displays and keyboards were bottom of the barrel compared to what the iPhone brought. Apple added music and some useful apps to make a well rounded experience, and they changed the world again. To paraphrase Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "Dammit, we have to start over."
The iPad is one of those things that I can take or leave, but until it came along the tablet market was struggling. None of the companies making them seemed to know what they were supposed to be. Half seemed to be just displays with computers built into the back, running stripped down versions of Windows, the other half seemed to be toys running bespoke operating systems. None of them amounted to much. Along comes the iPad, which instead of being a stripped down Mac requiring apps redesigned to use on the iPad, was simply a large iPhone and thus had access to its massive app base. Instant market. The world changed again - less noticeably this time - and suddenly the other companies realized what they should be doing.
What have we gotten during Cook's tenure? The Mac Pro, the iPhone 6, the iPad Pro and the Watch.
The Mac Pro. Its beautiful. The internal design is just on the human side of a miracle. I want one even though I don't need it. But its expensive. It also requires an external chassis for expansion. Around the time of Steve's return to Apple, I think it was Apple Recon/Pelagius that passed along rumors about a professional Mac that would have moved expansion to an outboard chassis or breakout box. That rumor resurfaced after the Cube but appeared to have been buried when the expandable G5 Pro came out. With the current Pro, it appears that the plan all along was to introduce a capable small professional machine that relied on external expansion, but the technology wasn't here to do it until recently. That kind of indicates to me that the Pro was something on the drawing board for a very long time, perhaps since 1997. Therefore I don't give much credit to Cook for the Pro.
The iPhone 6. Its beautiful...ish. I own one. It lacks the crispness of the previous 4 and 5. The rounded edges, besides making the phone hard to hold when its not safely in a case, also bring it closer to the look of Android phones. I would have preferred a tapered flat edge like my current iMac. That lack of attention to such tiny details was what Apple was known for and it is sadly lacking here.
The iPad Pro. Very nice, but its simply a larger iPad, extremely well executed. With a stylus.
The Watch. Despite being sort of a blob, it actually looks quite sleek. But its not like other companies were making terrible watches and Apple saw a huge market for a watch done right. They just decided to get into the Watch business? I do own one, though many times I wonder why.
I agree that the Watch should be opened to Android users, but that may not happen. I maintain that there is another use coming for the Watch, one that people are going to be blindsided by, and that use was something Steve had conceived of at least a decade ago. That is one reason Apple is keeping the Watch exclusively in their ecosystem for the time being. We shall see.
What is there really left for Apple to do? We all get caught up in the possible future iterations of our favorite products, begging for this or that to be added, but incremental advances do not a revolution make. Unless Apple can identify a service category that needs direction (music distribution), or a popular product type that begged for a top to bottom revamp (mp3 players, phones), what else is out there that a company like Apple could master, provided they had a visionary leader? I can't think of much. Home automation? Home theater? Electric cars? None of those are things that would take us by surprise the way the iPhone or iPod did. Those are more "by the way, we're getting into this market now", than an effort to change the world. There are already great products in all those categories.
Still, this is a matter of perception. As in, I can't personally see what they should be getting into. Given the surprise that some of the Stevenotes elicited in the press and on various forums, I think I shared that perceptual difficulty with a lot of people. Steve had that "knack" for seeing the goal and the path to get there though, and thats what Cook lacks. The symbiosis on Steve's team was legendary, with all of them working towards bringing the very best concepts to life in the very best way possible. But that doesn't mean that any of the individuals he left behind could take up his presentation clicker and keep going. I think the person who needs to lead Apple hasn't been presented yet. Or maybe Forstall, long rumored to have been personally selected by Steve as a possible successor, will pop out of the wings ten years later, having learned some hard lessons, and he'll steer the company back on track?
