
Apple is now run by a guy who is more like John Sculley than Steve Jobs - gvb
http://recode.net/2016/05/03/apple-is-now-run-by-a-guy-who-is-more-like-john-sculley-than-steve-jobs/
======
snowwrestler
Nobody was like Steve Jobs. So if that's the complaint against Tim Cook, well,
take a number. You could say the same thing about 7 billion other people.

Tim Cook has a few things over John Sculley.

A big difference is that Tim was at Apple for decades before taking over as
CEO. He joined Apple in 1998 as an SVP, which means he was part of Steve Jobs'
leadership team for the entirety of Apple's resurgence. The article says:

> Jobs obviously saved the company years later with the iMac, iPod, Macbook,
> iTunes, iPhone and iPad.

Tim Cook was part of the Apple leadership team for every single one of those
products. There hasn't been a "Steve Jobs era" followed by a "Tim Cook era."
There was a "Steve Jobs + Tim Cook era" and now it continues as a "Tim Cook
era."

And other people too, of course. Ctrl-F in the article for "Ive"\--no results.
An article about the past and future of Apple that doesn't mention Jonathan
Ive? Looks like another in a long line of "cult of personality" articles that
ascribe all success--or failure--to a single person, the CEO.

There are many other differences from Sculley. Tim Cook has been Apple CEO
before--this is his 2nd turn at it. He's a believer and defender of Apple's
culture. He personally understands computer engineering. He has personal
principles that he advocates for. Etc.

Apple has always had an ecosystem of second-guessers telling it what it should
do differently. The greatest strength of Tim Cook as CEO is that he, like
Jobs, doesn't listen to those folks.

~~~
mojojojo15
>An article about the past and future of Apple that doesn't mention Jonathan
Ive? Can someone explain this to me. I keep hearing about how big Jonathan Ive
is in relation to Apple and I think I've even seen a book that claims he is
_the_ genius behind Apple. But from what I see and understand he is mostly a
designer who executed on Steve Job's ideas (it's hard to think of the very
quirky and exacting design of Apple Products not having some major input from
the quirky and exacting Jobs) and I've even read somewhere that his major
contribution to the original Ipod (arguably the product most responsible for
Apple's comeback) was the white color of the earphones. Are you sure you're
not just replacing the cult of Jobs/Cook with the cult of Ives. I genuinely
would like to know why a product designer gets so much praise/credit for
Apples success since great design is only one of many reasons (and probably
not even the most important) for the great products they make

------
scholia
Sculley was a success at Apple: he took annual revenues from $0.98bn in 1983
to $8.00bn in 1993. After Steve Jobs's Macintosh flopped, Sculley saved it
with the Mac II.

Jobs rejoined Apple in 1997 when turnover was $7.078bn, after which turnover
declined to $5.36bn in 2001 before recovering to $8.28bn in 2004.

So Apple did better when Sculley was in charge ($0.98bn in 1983 to $8.00bn in
1993) than in the next decade, when he wasn't ($8.00bn in 1993 to $6.02bn in
2003).

What Sculley didn't do was successfully introduce non-Mac products (iPod,
iPhone, iPad), which Jobs did. The jury is out on whether Cook can do that
too.....

~~~
whatever_dude
To me there's a fascinating story there. Sculley was working for the _today_
and Jobs for the _tomorrow_. Doing either by itself is disastrous: living for
today means the company doesn't innovate and once its market momentum slows
down it'll die (RIM, Nokia?), and thinking too far ahead mean they cannot
polish their products and get the most they can of the current market either.

Apple without the return of Jobs wouldn't exist - it wouldn't have innovated
in anything. But without Sculley to give it some solid ground for a few years,
it would probably have gone bankrupt.

Next few years will be interesting.

~~~
snowwrestler
Remember that the Newton--which as a product concept was far ahead of its time
--was developed and launched under Sculley. So was OpenDoc, the Apple
"Advanced Technology Group," Quicktime, Quicktime VR, etc.

So I would not say that Apple failed to think about the future under Sculley.
It's not easy to understand or describe why Jobs succeeded as wildly as he did
in his 2nd tour at Apple. If it was, everyone would be doing it. :-)

One thing I rarely see discussed is the importance of the time in which Steve
Jobs succeeded. The success we ascribe now, in hindsight, to Jobs' incredible
leadership, might be in part the result of just a good match between what Jobs
could do, and what could succeed in the market at that time.

His principles did not really change that much, actually--he always believed
in owning as much of the tech stack as he could, and in producing integrated
products with custom hardware and software. That approach was too expensive
and inflexible to compete against Microsoft PCs the first time he was at
Apple. It failed at NeXT. But it succeeded wildly the second time around, at
Apple.

Would Apple be doing much better now under Steve Jobs' leadership? I don't
think it's entirely clear. Some aspects of Apple's success continue to match
up with Jobs' vision, but the areas in which Apple seems to have the most
challenges--services and interoperable ecosystems--were never really Jobs'
strong suits.

~~~
whatever_dude
To your last point, I think it's less of a factor of the person in the lead or
his ideas, and more about what was expected of that person.

Sculley was more of a manager, Jobs was a dictator. Once Jobs was back, he was
somehow able to lead the company in a near-authoritarian way, and despite many
flukes, it allowed the company to try many things that would not be readily
accepted by an all-powerful committee.

One authoritarian that is wrong half the time is better than a committee that
is not-wrong 100% of the time. The former tries a bunch of stuff, the latter
doesn't really try anything. (And to me that's what got RIM and Nokia killed).

~~~
snowwrestler
I don't know that I would agree that Apple is not trying anything. The Apple
Watch, Apple Pay, Swift, HealthKit and ResearchKit, HomeKit--potentially a
_car_... if anything, the critique against Cook seems to be that Apple is
trying too many things and losing focus.

I agree that Jobs was a special talent who could command the organization. I
think Cook is emphasizing collaboration because he knows he can't lead Apple
the same way Jobs could. Probably no one can.

------
brashrat
A personality like Steve Jobs's would never tolerate having another Steve Jobs
around, so this is what I always assumed. Steve was always laser focused on a
small number of elements to create buzz (one button, really thin, it's a
cube...) and a small number of products (goodbye old model, here is new model,
it's not compatible).

Tim Cook has been adding blur from the first moment.

I also see an odd parallel in another corporate transition... even though it's
the same leadership, is the new re/code more than a shadow of the old All
Things D?

~~~
mwfunk
Tim Cook is an operations guy, Steve Jobs was a product guy. Tim Cook hasn't
been "adding blur" to anything. CEOs have an executive role but whatever they
do beyond the usual management and delegation stuff is more a function of
their personal interests than explicit responsibilities that are part of the
job description. It's very unusual for CEOs to micromanage product design, and
in most cases it's an organizational antipattern when they do.

------
typetypetype
I remember an anecdote in the Steve Jobs biography where the first thing he
did when he came back to Apple was severly cutting down a confusing and
overlapping matrix of products. Now that he's gone, that matrix is creeping
back up. I've lost count how many different types of iPhones and iPads there
are now.

~~~
panic
The iPad lineup in particular has gotten pretty bad. There's the iPad Pro
12.9-inch, the iPad Pro 9.7-inch, the iPad Air 2 (which also has a 9.7-inch
display), the iPad mini 2 and the iPad mini 4.

Why would I get a 9.7-inch iPad Pro over a 9.7-inch iPad Air 2? What's the
difference between an iPad mini 2 and an iPad mini 4, and what happened to the
iPad mini 3?

They ought to just have three iPad models, distinguished by size: iPad Pro
(the 12.9-inch model), iPad Air (the 9.7-inch model) and iPad mini (the
7.9-inch model). That would make it much easier to tell the difference and
decide which one you want.

~~~
kirykl
The 9.7 Pro and Air are nearly identical. The naming is unfortunate. If the
9.7 Air is v1 the 9.7 Pro should be v2 of the same name. But the product
itself is the iPad, there's isn't a competing iPhone XXL. The Pro/Air is just
a sub configuration on price and specs.

~~~
brashrat
whoosh! you provided a Tim Cook response to a Steve Jobs comment.

~~~
kirykl
If OP is actually Steve Jobs commenting I missed my opportunity, I have more
important questions than iPad models

------
acqq
How about dialing down the "growth" expectations? How big do you expect Apple
to be for $deity sake? They are big. Much bigger than ever. Now it's not about
big "growth" anymore, it's about staying big.

Edit: whoever wants to give some meaningful arguments can maybe use some
comparable company as an example.

AAPL Mkt cap: 531,84B

MSFT Mkt cap: 382,79B

~~~
pavlov
If "no more growth" is going to be Apple's story to investors, the company
needs to start paying a much bigger dividend.

~~~
osweiller
If you exclude the cash horde (edit - the zombies hired to protect the vault
full of cash), Apple's P/E ratio is running at around 5 right now. IBM is 10.
Microsoft is about 35 if excluding their much smaller cash pile.

Apple is ridiculously "undervalued" compared to any peer in the industry. It
is a money printing colossus.

Having said that, the market seems to get shivers around $600B, and that
psychological barrier imposes a friction that makes the rules of the game
change. No one can stay above that for long, and in the case of Apple its
profoundly out of scale numbers makes everyone simply put it in a different
universe of valuation.

~~~
MollyR
Is that really the whole story ? [http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-isnt-
really-sitting-o...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-isnt-really-
sitting-on-216-billion-in-cash-2016-01-26) I honestly don't know and am
interested in what you think of this article.

~~~
osweiller
That is an interesting article, but the meat of it contradicts, in a common
sense, the title.

For instance, no one thinks that Apple has a big vault with hundreds of
billions in it. Like all rational players, they hold most of their negotiables
in short term securities. For tax reasons they also have been taking on debt
in some areas rather than liberate cash from elsewhere.

But they have an enormous, enormous amount of wealth sitting virtually at a
standstill. They have announced that they're going to spend a lot of it to buy
back shares (boosting the value of the remaining shares), but they've been
doing this so slowly they're adding to their pile quicker than they're
spending it.

------
Bud
There are many things in this article I feel compelled to attack or nitpick
about. But just to highlight one: the assertion that "the big problem is that
Apple’s last hit product, the iPad, came under Jobs and launched six years
ago".

That ignores the Apple Watch, which has basically created a new product
category and proceeded to immediately account for _more than half_ the total
sales in that category. The Watch has outsold the iPhone during its early
days, as well. For any other company, this would be reported on as a great
triumph. Unless you have wild fantasies that Apple is supposed to magically
produce an iPhone-sized business every two years, even though no other company
in the history of money has ever produced an iPhone-sized business even one
time. Double-digit millions of units of sales, first year, for a brand-new
product that nobody's ever spent $400+ per unit on is pretty good.

~~~
talmand
>> ...which has basically created a new product category...

What?

~~~
fredsir
How many smartwatches did you see announced before the rumors of the Apple
Watch emerged?

~~~
talmand
How many examples of a particular technology has to exist before someone can't
boldly claim that Apple created the category?

~~~
fredsir
I think the gist is that smart watches existed before Apple announced their
watch, but as soon as Apple announced the Apple Watch, a bajillion were
announced, created and put on sale even before Apple started selling theirs.

Did they invent the smart watch? No. Did they innovate and start a new chapter
of the category? I think so.

~~~
talmand
I totally disagree. There were smartwatches before Apple's, therefore the
category already existed. It may not have been a high profile category in some
people's eyes, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there.

Also, I disagree on the bajillion number, for reasons other than the obvious.
There were quite a few viable smartwatches on the market and many in the
pipeline before Apple's. Plus, the watches not counting after the rumor of an
Apple watch is a silly claim as well. There are numerous rumors of Apple
working on a new product; for instance, that logic dictates Apple created the
smart TV category.

Why isn't it good enough that Apple entered the market with a nice product?
Why do people have to give more credit than what is due?

------
gumby
This oversells Jobs' execution. Let's not forget that he once held a whole
media event to announce...an ipod dock. And Apple forecast the iPhone as
possibly eventually capturing 1% of the phone market.

The iPhone is an extra-extraordinary product, but even in retrospect it wasn't
considered as amazing when it came out. The watch reminds me of the iPod in
terms of when it entered the market (somewhat early, after others had probed
and validated it a bit) and under-the-radar adoption rate.

If you ignore personalities, the question really is: can the machine continue
to pump out extraordinary products. Not "can the machine pump out another
iPhone".

------
kyriakos
there's a limit of how many shiny things you can sell. it's not tim cook's
fault.

apple is diversifying, if the car rumors are true it means that they are
trying something totally new. its just that building a revolutionary car takes
a lot more planning and effort than creating a new iteration of iphone.

------
jamespitts
It has been a long time since the metaphor comparing apples to oranges was
more apt.

------
coldcode
John Sculley sold sugar water and never did anything worthwhile after that.
Tim Cook is running the world's most valuable company with more cash than most
of the world's countries put together. He's not Jobs, no one is. It's like
complaining if you are not Einstein there is no point in being a physicist
because you won't change the world forever.

~~~
emodendroket
So? As the article says, from Cook's position many executives would have made
a capable run of the past five years; the question is what Apple is going to
do in the future.

~~~
yardie
My money is on self-driving cars. They have AI (Siri), Maps, Location (through
Yelp and partners) the only thing left is a physical car. Their Carplay SDK is
just them dipping a toe in. I expect, like the Moto Rokkr, it's going to go
from a partnership to an all out race.

------
messick
I never worked for Steve, but do work with a lot of people who did. I never
heard once heard someone say: Man, I sure wish Steve was still here instead of
Tim.

Not that Steve isn't missed, of course. It's just that Tim is also great.

------
slantaclaus
I've been saying this for years. Everyone always defended him as if he were
actually responsible for Apple's success

