
Tim Cook's Email to Employees About Apple's $1T Milestone - dsr12
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/read-tim-cooks-email-to-employees-about-apples-1-trillion
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jedberg
At Netflix, the milestone we celebrated was subscriber numbers, since that is
what drove the business. Someone once asked our CEO why we didn't have a
holiday party, and he said in effect that he'd rather celebrate important
business milestones, and not a day on the calendar.

It's interesting to me that Mr. Cook is downplaying this, but it makes some
sense, since the price of the stock (and therefore the valuation) is only
loosely tied to the success of the company.

It seems like the CEOs who really know what they are doing choose their
celebrations carefully.

A good lesson to learn here.

~~~
joeblau
> At Netflix, the milestone we celebrated was subscriber numbers

I feel like this is the same trap that Facebook fell into. Celebrating
subscribers is great until you top out.

~~~
ASalazarMX
Why this crazy obsession for meteoric growth? If Netflix tops paid
subscribers, it's likely doing incredibly well. Hell, even free subscribers
make enormous amounts of money to Facebook.

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kire2345
Isn't it a little bit sad to see that Tim Cook in this situation still looks
backwards and talks about Steve Jobs in half of the email? Instead of being
forward looking and laying out his vision of the future of apple and the
products to come? He really is still simply maintaining Jobs' business, trying
to repeat what Jobs said as often as possible so that he sounds like him.

~~~
snowwrestler
Every culture has its myths, and in Apple's culture today, no myth is bigger
than Steve Jobs. It might be wise of Cook to invoke Jobs at big moments.

He knows he's never going to match that legend... so why try? Instead of
fighting it, he uses it to foster a common purpose within the company.

In terms of "maintaining" the business, Apple's share price when Cook became
CEO seven years ago was about a quarter of what it is now. Pretty good
maintenance.

~~~
leesalminen
I was just having a conversation with a friend about Tim and his role at
Apple.

I posited that Steve probably wasn’t the right person to grow Apple to $1T in
market cap and that Tim really made it happen. My friend took the opposite
side believing that Tim is just running of Steve’s ideas and that Tim had
relatively little to do with making it happen.

Curious to see what HN thinks.

~~~
thereare5lights
This kind of debate is like who's the GOAT of the NBA, Lebron or MJ. It's
gonna be a lot of cherry-picking of data, subjective thoughts, etc. Not that
the debate wouldn't be fun or illuminating, just that an objective answer is
probably out of reach.

~~~
leesalminen
For sure. It’s not a black and white topic.

This is an interesting topic for me as I find myself asking similar questions
about my role at a company I founded.

I founded a company currently valued in the low-mid 8 digits. I successfully
brought the company through an acquisition and have doubled revenues since.

I keep coming back to an article I read on HN years ago talking about the 4
types of CEOs: founder, growth, maintenance, death (bankruptcy). While I’ve
found success in 1 and 2, I don’t enjoy 2 as much as 1 and I don’t think I’d
be any good at 3 or 4.

I’m probably experiencing a form of imposter syndrome as the board &
leadership are all satisfied with my performance, but the thoughts still
linger.

~~~
raleigh_user
Read Rocket Fuel. Its a book I am sure the HN crowd will critique but it has
made a large difference in how my biz operates and how multiple founders fill
roles. I am very much an "integrator" from the book. I am less of the massive,
big picture and more of the day to day execution. Good at growth/maintenance.
Not great as a true "founder". And I have managed through near death and it
seemingly took years off my life so I'd prefer not to go back to that one!

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hal9000xp
A bit off-topic. I've noticed that P/E ratio (Price / Earnings) is pretty
decent for Apple and it doesn't change much. In fact, since 2009 till today
P/E stays in corridor between ~10 and ~20. What it means is that $1TB market
cap is relatively cheap price for Apple. Their stock price merely reflects
growing net income, so their EPS (Earning Per Share) growing steadily over
years:

[https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/pe-
rati...](https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/pe-ratio)

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elorant
So how much cash has Apple amassed in the last fifteen years or so since the
iPhone reign? I'd say enough to keep them floating for at least another 20
years. And a lot of that could be attributed to Cook.

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mkirklions
HN downvotes anything critical of apple, so heres my criticisms-

>Anti consumer- Proprietary hardware, non standard devices, and a constant
cornering of user content. I remember burning CDs from Itunes and ripping them
back just to use them on my mp3 player... The hardware is 2x the price of non
Apple brand, this should come as no surprise.

>Anti developer- It sounds like at bare minimum I will need a 600 dollar
refurbished apple mini to compile my app. And pay for yearly development. And
apple intentionally breaks code. Not to mention prior to 2014, they were harsh
on app developers denying many people's hard work.

I cannot understand the fandom on HN, why would anyone be a fan of such an
aggressive company?

EDIT: 3 downvotes and 0 reasons why? Did Apple buy accounts on HN?

~~~
mikec3010
> why would anyone be a fan of such an aggressive company?

For all their faults, they brought personal computing quality out of the
gutter and actually gave a fuck about UX.

To this day, you can't even reliably search for local files on a win10 system.
They literally laid off their QA department.

~~~
rootlocus
> To this day, you can't even reliably search for local files on a win10
> system. They literally laid off their QA department.

I would've thought this to be an exaggeration, but I have the discord app
installed, it's automatically starting at boot, It's pinned to the task bar,
but when I search for "discord" in the start menu, it gives me a worthless
"search the web" result. It's almost insulting...

~~~
opencl
Ironically there's a Search and Indexing Troubleshooting Wizard built into
Windows 10 because the feature is so unreliable but the Start Menu search
doesn't find it even when it's working properly.

~~~
mikec3010
The conspiracy theorist in me says they broke it on purpose to encourage users
to migrate to azure or onedrive. Even on 3+ghz CPUs with multi-gbps SSDs,
copying hundreds of little files on my win10 OEM pc was painfully slow. I
suspect the A/V was scanning every single one. They have every incentive to
gimp local file I/O to promote their higher-profit cloud services.

~~~
opencl
That is the Defender real time protection, loves to hog enormous amounts of
CPU during any file I/O, you can disable it temporarily but it very
aggressively nags you about it. However it does let you exclude specific
folders and will not prevent you from doing things like excluding your entire
home folder or even C:\\.

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mhb
Steve (alone?) founded Apple?

~~~
alaskamiller
Your pedantry is annoying. "PERSON DID THING on the belief" is a literary turn
of phrase.

~~~
mhb
Not sure which pedantry is annoying to you, but I thought it was surprising
that the guy running Apple isn't crediting at least both Steves for founding
the company on that belief.

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th0ma5
Mentioned elsewhere, but also the first company that should have paid $1
Trillion in taxes by now.

~~~
getsugablitz2
If they made their current net annual income for the entirety of their
existence (not even close), then they would've needed to be taxed ~50% to have
reached $1 trillion in taxes.

I get (or at least hope) that it's an exaggeration, but I'm not too keen on
seemingly witty phrases without substance that get repeated everywhere.

~~~
trophycase
Seems reasonable. "People" who make far less than that pay over 50%

