Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple

The article is short on details why he thinks Tim Cook is like Steve Ballmer, except for saying that Apple is slowly missing the boat on AI.<p>I don&#x27;t know what Amazon does for AI, I haven&#x27;t seen anything convincing from them, but I&#x27;ll trust the author that they are working on it.<p>However it&#x27;s tough to beat Google in this space, because AI and machine learning is what Google has focused on since <i>their beginnings</i>. Google&#x27;s own Search has always been a limited form of AI on which most humans with access to the Internet have come to depend upon. And it is tough to beat them because they not only have 20 years of accumulated knowledge and talent, but they also have <i>a lot of data</i> on users and haven&#x27;t been afraid to break users&#x27; privacy in order to get that data.<p>Now say what you will of Tim Cook, but he&#x27;s nothing like Steve Ballmer, with one big difference being that Tim Cook&#x27;s Apple is making a stand for privacy and security, which is actually quite rare to witness in this day and age. He&#x27;s a man with principles and for this I appreciate him a lot, maybe more than I ever appreciated Steve Jobs.<p>It would also be stupid to try and beat Google on their own turf. It would be like trying to beat Microsoft at Windows or Office, or Amazon at AWS. And for important markets, Apple&#x27;s secret is that they never had to beat anyone in market share, all they had to do was to take over an important slice of the high-end market, which is something they are really good at.

My opinion is that the failure of Microsoft has less to do with Ballmer than with the absence of a Steve Jobs.<p>My experience with large corporations is that they naturally produce mediocrity. The ownership of the final product or service is too diluted, with too many people involved, pulling in too many conflicting directions. They employ people who individually know what &quot;good&quot; means and what should be done in an ideal world. But that knowledge and common sense gets lost with the bureaucracy and the scale of the organisation.<p>So unless you get someone at the top who will force the company to still achieve something great for their customers, you will end up with an MBA style manager who will make decisions based on options provided by his teams and get products designed based on specs from the top rather than trying to make something great.<p>A great example is Windows 8. I heard Sinofsky had already been sacked by the time he walked on stage to introduce Windows 8. Microsoft knew it was a shit OS, and decided to push it nevertheless. I have seen this happening so many times in other contexts.<p>But tablets are another example. Microsoft knew that tablets would be a big thing well before the introduction of the ipad. In fact I remember a pre-ipad interview of Ballmer where he was deploring that the Windows tablets never took off. The problem was that windows-based tablets were too mediocre to create a market.<p>But Apple is moving in that direction too now. The user experience is deteriorating with every iteration of iOS. I can&#x27;t think that someone at Apple thinks it&#x27;s a good user experience to nag their users with all of their services (Apply Pay, iCloud, Apple Music, etc) over and over, with multiple buttons to click to opt out. That will ultimately bite them too. Not overnight, but over 10 years like with Microsoft. Not Tim Cook&#x27;s fault. That&#x27;s what large corporations do.

Even if I generally agree with disappointment at the apparent &quot;maintenance mode&quot; of Apple&#x27;s product line, I am not sure Ballmer is the best analogy. My understanding is that Tim Cook actually is responsible for many of the supply chain innovations behind Apple&#x27;s dominant product lines. This is an incredibly hard technical feat, not just blustery MBA crap. I suppose it remains to be seen whether Apple can put its enormous cash hoard to work in R&amp;D and new product development. It could be possible for Apple to go the way of RIM but I think it would be very hard to kill them given their unique supply chain efficiencies (not to mention brand and balance sheet).

Apple does appear to be losing focus.<p>For example:<p>Apple has devalued the PRO moniker under Tim Cook&#x27;s guidance.<p>By trying to ram it&#x27;s Mobile OS into a PRO product (iPad PRO). I mean the UI grid is still 4 x 5 on a massive 12 inch display. Nobody noticed it feels more like Fisher Price? And the iPad &quot;PRO&quot; apps are all dumbed down, feature limited versions of actual pro desktop apps.<p>Then, by stagnating a once well regarded PRO product, the Macbook PRO, they further eroded the PRO moniker. Did they delay significant updates to the Macbook PRO to see if existing users would eventually give the iPad PRO a try first? Or did they simply want to drive Desktop OS marketshare back to Windows?<p>And what about the slim Macbook with a fancy new port (USB-C) that&#x27;s still not available on any other Macbook, even 1.5+ years later!!!? Yes, that&#x27;s exactly how you devalue the PRO moniker. By releasing new, cutting edge tech on your consumer products first. And then wait years before adding that tech to your PRO line (I know, the new Macbook PRO is rumoured to ONLY have USB-C ... sigh).<p>Don&#x27;t even get started on the Mac PRO. Ya, that ridiculously underpowered, overpriced PRO computer that you forgot about, that looks like a NYC subway trash can. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=nyc+subway+trash+can&amp;tbm=isch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=nyc+subway+trash+can&amp;tbm=isc...</a> Talk about an awesome PRO design.<p>Talk about losing focus.<p>Eerily similar to later stage Ballmer Microsoft.

Tim Cook is a &quot;Bozo&quot; - He has moved the focus away from computers and the companies core professional users and turned Apple into a fashionable health services company. They will coast for a while on their dominant mobile market share but eventually the stagnation and lack of new products will catch up to them.<p>He built a watch, which was a &quot;me too&quot; product and answered a question that no one asked. Jobs would never have done this because of the marginal increase in utility that smart watches provides users.<p>He also wasted company time and resources on trying to build a car, which is completely outside Apple&#x27;s skill sets (the supply chains and profit margins are radically different). It seemed like he was just trying to do something innovative instead of actually looking at the needs and demands of users inside the computing industry where apple should be focused.<p>Its unfortunate that Jobs didn&#x27;t see his lack of product development skills when he made him CEO - Jobs always talked about how product companies falter when marketing&#x2F;sales&#x2F;supply chain guys run the company and not product guys.

I really like the dichotomy Steve Blank uses between &quot;process&quot; people and &quot;creative&quot; people. I&#x27;ve only been working in tech companies for ~10yrs but all my experience working in companies have shown me that the more a person is obsessed with processes and structure, the less they contribute to the real business value (product, design, marketing, etc). Not only in their own time investment in the company but in their influence on others around them, which tends to be high because they usual get managerial roles somehow.<p>These are the people who obsess over flaws in how work is done rather than the work itself. Which has it&#x27;s place in larger companies but even there it really needs to be balanced, much more in favour of outward work.<p>Being a front-end dev I&#x27;ve had to work with many &#x27;product managers&#x27; who spent a big chunk of their time on the process stuff and most of the product ideas were just shots in the dark without backing it up with data or experience, or otherwise entirely reactionary to local customer issues or the bosses moods, rather than with a strong vision or focusing on high level trends in customer behaviour. Largely, I believe, because they spent a lot of their finite resources focusing on the wrong things (internal optimization rather than external, ie talking to customers, value prop).<p>There are many many traps that startups can fall into and this is a big one. Especially when companies get VC and start adding non-core team members, then feel the need to bring in managers.

One important thing that visionaries get credit for, but perhaps shouldn&#x27;t...<p>Being in the right place at the right time.<p>It is a delightful bit of luck that Steve Jobs made it back to Apple. That scenario could have been way different where Apple bought BeOS, and Steve Jobs didn&#x27;t return to Apple.<p>If Jobs isn&#x27;t at Apple, he doesn&#x27;t have the opportunity or resources to make his vision for the iMac, iBook, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, or iPad a real thing. In fact, he probably wouldn&#x27;t have had the reason to envision any of the things at NEXT.<p>Also, you could argue that Jobs being at Apple when ARM got good enough for mass market smart gadgets at scale played into it too. If the tech isn&#x27;t quite there, it doesn&#x27;t look as interesting at all.<p>Without the right tech being available, Apple stalls out at the iMac and Power Mac and so on and is a profitable computer vendor, but not the most valuable company in the world.<p>So, Tim Cook might not be as visionary, but it might also be a poor time for anyone to be CEO as the opportunities shifted.

Luck is generally involved in success.<p>So maybe this is just regression toward the mean and hasn&#x27;t that much to do with whoever is the CEO.<p>In other words, every very successful company is bound to be less successful later. Nothing really exciting about this.

I noticed that Apple lost track of usability since Cook came after their release of a new keyboard at first, new arrows buttons on it are completely unusable, on older keyboards they had spacing between the left&#x2F;right and buttons on top, now they extended left&#x2F;right buttons and it makes it incredibly hard to &quot;feel&quot; where they are, and the fact that MacBooks pros still have an old layout makes it a night mare to switch between desktop and laptop programming.<p>Another one is a new lock screen on iOS 10, sometimes the fingerprint does not work or the finger is dirty and i know I want to unlock it with a pin, before I used to be able to just swipe right away and type the pin, now it won&#x27;t let me and I have to repeatatly press the home button until it figures out that the fingerprint won&#x27;t work and it has to show me the pin enter screen.<p>Might be little things but it&#x27;s what used to separate Apple from the crowd, I don&#x27;t want them to lose focus on those. And don&#x27;t get me started on the new OS X, which makes my maxed out 2014 rMBP look like slow PC from 2000.

The single useful thing the article could have presented was how or why Cook&#x27;s&#x2F;Apple&#x27;s efforts at AI products will fail while Google&#x27;s will succeed; how Apple&#x27;s AI products will be the Windows Phone of Cook&#x27;s tenure (or, for that matter, how Windows Phone failed or could have been done differently). Without explaining how apparently similar efforts will yield different outcomes, this is all jazz-hands about CEO personalities and Fortune buzzwords.

Apologies for this most gratuitous of bikeshedding, but if you&#x27;re going to use proper superscripts, <i>please</i> sort out the line-heights.

There are clearly many holes in Apple&#x27;s armor these days, but the one that irks me the most is how Apple&#x27;s literally handing the Education market to Google. I swear if Apple&#x27;s hardware announcements this week don&#x27;t include a Chromebook competitor I&#x27;m going to figuratively scream.<p>Chromebooks are fantastic products but I grew up in the Microsoft dominated 90&#x27;s and hated it. It feels like Apple&#x27;s almost trying to make itself obsolete in markets it once owned. Competition please!

He&#x27;s underestimating their push into medical research and apps. It&#x27;s $3 Trillion in the U.S. every year and they are further along than any other of the Big Techs.<p>This: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2016-09-27&#x2F;aetna-to-make-apple-watch-available-in-health-monitoring-push" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2016-09-27&#x2F;aetna-to-...</a><p>Is not about selling more watches and phones. And Aetna alone has 23 million members.

It&#x27;s also a power game, who gets the next number one spot. People want to have their shot at giving direction to such a big ship. So they make friends with the current boss, ensure loyalty by key employees to themselves, gain authority over important projects. Then you cannot just fire them or put someone else in front of them. I think it&#x27;s also okay, that companies come and go. If you look at it more closely each company is simply a paper and a bank account. The ideas and people who made the disruptions possible will move on to other paper-account combinations and innovate there.

Applies to Pichai at Google too. Google was a search company that put the browser&#x2F;mobile guy in charge. You are not going to see stuff like this<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;aurelieherbelot.net&#x2F;pears&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;aurelieherbelot.net&#x2F;pears&#x2F;</a> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;aurelieherbelot.net&#x2F;how-small-is-the-world-wide-web-really&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;aurelieherbelot.net&#x2F;how-small-is-the-world-wide-web-r...</a><p>come out of Google for the simple reason they are busy playing empire defense all the while the need for a centralized search engine reduces.

That&#x27;s a dreadful comparison and makes no sense.

The article mentions Mark Zuckerberg only in passing but it is worth noting that Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are another visionary-CEO + world-class-executor &quot;dynamic duo&quot; in Silicon Valley. Who will replace Mark Zuckerberg after his departure? If it&#x27;s Sheryl Sandberg, the same Steve Ballmer &#x2F; Tim Cook scenario will repeat itself and we can look forward to future articles like &quot;Why Sheryl Sandberg is the next Tim Cook and why she still has her job at Facebook&quot;.

Funny that the article fails to mention Jony Ive as the obvious successor to Cook. Doesn&#x27;t it look like Apple has its next &quot;creative CEO&quot; all prepped up?

Their bet is wrong. Ai is definitely the future, but people dont want Ai driving everything they do, people want control, they feel liberated when they can control something so much from ones hands, this is half the reason adoption of smart watches is so small. Its not held in the hand, but worn. The steering and control of a powerful vehicle, boat, car etc, we dont want these things automated. Apple is on the wrong track, I agree with that but dont believe the reason to be a lack of adoption in the Ai arena. Apple&#x27;s design choices since Jobs checked out have been inferior to its previous conceptions, that will be their downfall, and that has no comparison to Balmer. Another point the author fails to see is that Apple is not so much an innovator as much as they are a good perfectionist. They didnt create the OS, the Smartphone, the Mobile OS, etc. They simply waited for these things to pickup mass user adoption, they looked closed at refining the points that users complained about, then they created their own version of said product, should they choose to go into Ai, this is how it will be done, after the world has spoken its gripes on the current Ai offerings.

Now that we have Nadella, it&#x27;s kind of scary for Tim Cook to be compared to Ballmer...

It is worth noting that the author has a background in startups and entrepreneurship. Apple however is several magnitudes larger and running new initiatives on startup level requires isolation from the main business and a portfolio approach. Some companies show their their cards, some hint they have a list and Apple is traditionally very secretive.<p>The question is not whether Tim is the right guy for innovation but whether he has put the right guy into the place. John Ivy certainly continues to play a big role but has&#x2F;is&#x2F;will there be another internal leader emerging?<p>&gt; About Steve (Blank)<p>&gt; After 21 years in 8 high technology companies, I retired in 1999. I co-founded my last company, E.piphany, in my living room in 1996. My other startups include two semiconductor companies, Zilog and MIPS Computers, a workstation company Convergent Technologies, a consulting stint for a graphics hardware&#x2F;software spinout Pixar, a supercomputer firm, Ardent, a computer peripheral supplier, SuperMac, a military intelligence systems supplier, ESL and a video game company, Rocket Science Games.<p>&gt; Total score: two large craters (Rocket Science and Ardent), one dot.com bubble home run (E.piphany) and several base hits.

Interesting read.<p>Though, there&#x27;s something fabulously pretentious about writing an opinion piece and then concluding it with a &quot;Lessons Learned&quot; section.

Hasn&#x27;t Microsoft done the right thing here though as a company for the long-term: visionary CEO leaves meaning potential for great risk to the company &gt; put someone in place who shores up the finances &gt; once finances are in a great position bring a visionary in and change things around again. It reads to me like Microsoft&#x27;s long-term strategy as a company is actually really good. They must have known they could not continue their dominance but they could continue to be relevant if they had the finances to back it up. Swapping one visionary CEO for another could is a risk because big ideas don&#x27;t always work (if executed poorly).<p>For any company, a charismatic dominant CEO leaving causes instability a board would be foolish not to try and stabilise things at the company before moving on again. A CEO does not act in isolation even though this article paints it like that and takes guidance from their board.

Their is a feeling that CEOs of these large companies are completely responsible for the direction a company takes. I have never served as a CEO, but I can&#x27;t help but imagine that large share holders are also very dominant figures.<p>One of the attributes that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates appeared to share (I have never met either) was a massive amount of trust&#x2F;faith to run their respective companies (eventually).<p>I imagine that this must translate to the board room where they were provided the freedom to pursue avenues that a newly promoted CEO would just not be allowed to do.<p>The author praises Steve Ballmer and Tim Cook for their ability to drive short term growth, but had they failed to do so they may have been replaced by someone more willing to focus on these returns. Eventually as disruption occurs the share holders start to prioritize facing these new challenges.

&quot;got a major release of Windows out without the usual trauma&quot;? Did he already release Windows8? If Steve Blank talks about Windows 10 he must have missed something, or the usual trauma he experiences is way worse than what I would even think possible as an extreme case.

I can sort of see the analogy but it does disservice to the way Ballmer led Microsoft to become anti-customer in their promotion of DRM technologies, among other strategic errors. Tim Cook seems genuinely pro-user in his emphasis on privacy.

Website-idea: Make a list of previous articles that predict the future of Apple. ;)

These hyped &quot;conversational interfaces&quot; and augmented reality remind me of Clippy and Microsoft Bob. And IoT is real disaster, not innovation. So good that they&#x27;re not jumping onto these bandwagons.

Well, it seems Apple are actually increasing R&amp;D in AI:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;appleinsider.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;16&#x2F;10&#x2F;17&#x2F;apples-new-japan-rd-center-to-build-very-different-artificial-intelligence-tech-tim-cook-says" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;appleinsider.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;16&#x2F;10&#x2F;17&#x2F;apples-new-japan-r...</a>

There are two kinds of people, those who dont understand Apple, and those who Thinks they understand Apple but they dont.

Hey I may be wrong one day and this comment might not age well but I believe what Apple _is_ doing with AI is crucial. Baking privacy into AI and ML is really necessary and I&#x27;m happy someone is thinking about it. I think Apple has a lot of AI stuff going on behind closed doors.

Ballmer led Microsoft through years of sales and profits increases. Maybe MS isn&#x27;t &quot;cool&quot; but he certainly left a very solid and profitable company.<p>Being compared to Ballmer is a compliment in my view.

Jesus.<p>Ballmer and Cook have made extreme amounts of money for their shareholders. Major super truckloads of money. That&#x27;s what businesses do.<p>The meta narrative of disruption is marketing, but somehow everyone keeps talking about it like its real.<p>Even weirder is the emotional responses from some of the other commenters about cloud providers? It&#x27;s like they are sports teams or something. Just like sports teams they have nothing to do with you, really. It&#x27;s just a brand that somehow you identify with.<p>(You could carry the sports team metaphor a lot further...tax abatements to build datacenters&#x2F;arenas...but let&#x27;s leave it there...)

This is one of the best articles I&#x27;ve read in awhile.

This title really rubs me the wrong way. To say one person “is” someone quite different seems like a reductive and clickbaity way to say that they are alike in one or two small ways. Better title: “Cook, Ballmer, and the Problem with Naming Successors Who Are Good at Execution”

No.

It&#x27;s a little weird for me that a company supposedly in &quot;maintenance mode&quot; has been ignoring the Mac for so long. Even a 5th rate computer company can manage to come out with a new model once in a while. How did Apple get to the point where a company in &quot;maintenance mode&quot; ignores a big product line like this for so long? Is Apple not capable of executing on more than 1 project at once?

Apple bought Siri, and then largely did nothing with it. The founders left, and started another AI startup: Viv.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;09&#x2F;siri-creator-shows-off-first-public-demo-of-viv-the-intelligent-interface-for-everything&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;09&#x2F;siri-creator-shows-off-fir...</a><p>That AI capability <i>could</i> have been Apples.<p>Instead of concentrating on user experience as a <i>whole</i>, they concentrated on &quot;look and feel&quot; of devices, along with UI.<p>Those are all good things. But having an iPhone with a <i>useful</i> AI would be a killer.<p>Instead, Google is pushing hard in this area. And will likely do well. Because they&#x27;re a data analysis company. Not a &quot;pretty picture&quot; company.

I&#x27;m never impressed with the opinions of people who insist that Microsoft is some sort of failure. The utter lack of incorporating basic observation of reality into these theories is good for people who hate Microsoft, but little else.