Bloomberg has published an in-depth piece by journalists Austin Carr and Mark Gurman about the rise of Apple under Tim Cook's leadership, covering several attributes of the CEO that took over from Steve Jobs, including his diplomatic acumen, operational prowess, eye for detail, and manifest success in making Apple one of the biggest companies in the history of modern business.
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The story touches on a number of topics in the recent history of Apple's meteoric rise under Cook's leadership, including the political sensitivities of outsourcing production to China, Cook's relationship with current and former U.S. presidents, his cost-conscious approach to new products, and the strategic difficulties of managing Apple's product diversification in a global-spanning supply chain.
Other highlights include:
- Steve Jobs' blunt response when President Obama asked him why Apple couldn't make the iPhone in the U.S.
- Tim Cook's unrelenting work ethic.
- Cook's unlikely friendship with President Trump, and Apple's silence in the face of falsehoods propagated by the former president about Apple production coming back to the U.S.
- Supply chain managers' alarm upon seeing the initial design of the 2013 "trashcan" Mac Pro.
- Internal pressure at Apple to decouple from China over censorship, human-rights violations, and criticism about labor conditions at mainland factories.
- Apple's continued success in the face of the global health crisis.
- Apple's fightback against claims of the company's "monopoly power" and its ongoing feud with big name software developers and social media platforms like Spotify, Epic Games, and Facebook.
For all the details, be sure to check out the full long read over on Bloomberg.
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Top Rated Comments
The reason Apple versions of those services exist is to support the sale of Apple hardware mostly. The reason AWS/Spotify etc.. is to make money by being as globally dominant as possible. Very different things.
It’s taken 10 long years to prove it, but it’s clear that Steve Jobs made the right move in handing the reins of Apple over to Tim Cook, who in reality was already overseeing most of a CEO’s traditional duties even when Steve Jobs was still around anyways.
Jobs was right for his era, but he would have been a disaster for the Cook era. Cook is amazing, and has been responsible for most of the achievements of Apple, though not the initial innovation and concept that Jobs provided. Cook has refined the culture and expanded it, and has done as fine a job as any CEO in American history, if not world business history.
He's Eisenhower, not Churchill.
And Apple is better off for it.