3 Years In, a "B" For Tim Cook's Performance at Apple 90
Cult of Mac has taken a look at the three years since Tim Cook began his job as Apple's CEO, and rates him a "solid B." Cook might be neither as charismatic or volatile as Steve Jobs was, but he's made some interesting moves and statements. One factor (an area in which Cult of Mac gives Cook an A) is employee happiness, something for which Jobs was not always known: Cook’s highest “grade” on this hypothetical report card may come from Apple employees. Though the lanky 53-year-old is reportedly short on small talk, his people skills have earned him a 93 percent approval rating from a sampling of almost 2,000 people who work at Apple on website Glass Door, where anonymous employees can rate their satisfaction with the overall work environment as well as give thumbs up or down for the CEO.
Stock is at a record high (Score:3, Insightful)
The CEO must try new products... (Score:2)
Re:Stock is at a record high (Score:5, Insightful)
the proof is in there pudding, so to speak. Depending on how you define the market they may or may not be losing a lot of ground to android. The Mac Pro is awesome design but currently a niche product. I like where they're going on software and services, and how their jettisoning old mac apps like iPhoto for lightweight apps like photos originally from iOS. Stock prices are a poor indicator of long term positive decisions, but a good indicator of bad times when the stock is in the he crapper, which it's not.
let's check in again in a couple years. Two long-term dangers: first, he's been getting by on a "great products in the pipeline" story for a bit, and it's time to put up or shut up. A lot of people will be really disappointed if there's not iwatch this year. Second, so much of their revenue is based on just a handful of products, and if the market suddenly shifts against their favor or if they release a dud, then there will be heck to pay.
Re:Stock is at a record high (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree. Apple still is coasting on Steve Job's risks. Coasting is fine in a stactic market, not in one full with change.
What happened to AppleTV? Oh, netflix and amazon and rokubox all claimed that pie because Apple was too stodgy to move on it.
Steve Jobs took chances. Where does Tim Cooke take chances? All I see is him betting on sure things and doing things for good PR.
Apple is the new Sony of the 90s. What happens when the tablet market is saturated and declines? What happens if major phone networks start allowing people to bring their existing phones and getting a discount, breaking the 2 year upgrade cycle?
Re:Stock is at a record high (Score:4, Interesting)
AppleTV is alive and well. It's a piece of hardware like the Roku. As far as digital receivers go, AppleTV is the largest segment in the market and at 56% market share it's eclipsing all of it's competitors (Roku, Boxee, ChromeCast). The reason is simple, it offers everything I need and more and is truly plug and play (unlike either Boxee or Chrome) and doesn't nickel-and-dime the customer for channels like Roku does.
Apple never got into streaming movies/TV shows due to licensing costs. Netflix came way before Apple started doing movies on iTunes and Apple is happy to provide the device Netflix runs on.
Re:Stock is at a record high (Score:5, Insightful)
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Stock prices are a poor indicator of long term positive decisions ...
... but still better than any alternative.
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Don't agree. There seems to be even more of a disconnect between what market analysts say and how well an industry or company is doing. This is made worse by financializing, paying too much attention to quarterly bottom line and discouraging strategic vision. It is very much possible for management at a company to pay too much attention to what analysts think. It may be that if a significant number of a company's customers are banks and financial institutions that the management is much more vulnerable to
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AAPL is at a record high, up 99% since he took over. NASDAQ is up 93%, S&P500 up 77%. He's beating the market with the world's largest market cap. This is extraordinarily difficult.
I'll give him an A-, because GOOG is beating AAPL, up 137% in the same
Re:Stock is at a record high (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure why Apple needs to enhance shareholder value. Apple hasn't raised capital on the markets for years. Apple needs to be profitable, Apple needs to be an attractive platform for developers. Apple needs to be perceived, by its customers, as qualitatively superior to Android and Windows. But enhancing shareholder value should be a side effect of those more important goals, not a goal in itself.
Re:Stock is at a record high (Score:5, Informative)
Tim Cook once said: “If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock."
Besides, your faith in boards is disturbing. [nytimes.com]
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Apple doesn't design attractive platforms for developers for entertainment, or because they love changing the world. They do it to increase shareholder value. Being perceived, by its customers, as qualitatively superior to Android and Windows, is a means to the end of increasing shareholder value.
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You do realize that every legal entity that counts as a person under the law is a corporation, right? This includes such non-profit entities as cities and towns.
That's probably the biggest threat facing Apple in the post-Jobs era. There seems to be a rather ironic trend th
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The stock has been a roller-coaster ride over the last 3 years. The real good thing that he did was the deal with IBM to at last set foot in the enterprise. For a very long time a lot of people have been using iPhones at the office but most of the time it was in BYOD organizations. If the Apple-IBM thing can move forward (and if Apple can get a grip on reality, price-wise) it could be a new era for Apple.
Enterprise customers can't be dazzled by marketing or fashion trends like the typical Apple crowd. And w
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Ah, you mean the stock is a few pennies higher than its all time high, from two years ago. So do you give him a D for driving the stock price down 50% for those two years?
No, he gives him an A because the stock never fell lower than when he took over.
Stock price is not a be all and end all (Score:1)
Apple Stock is at a record high. He did what he was hired to do
I too own stocks of corporations and also am major stock owner of several companies
Stock price for me is not a be all and end all - for me, the future of the company is much more important than the _current_ stock price
For this, Tim Cook has failed, and has failed miserably
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Cough, cough stock buybacks do not count for shit https://www.apple.com/pr/libra... [apple.com]. All you are doing is using existing profits to reduce the number of shares, so reducing capital to artificially inflate share price. This is normally done when executives have no idea what to do with failing numbers mounting and still want a bonus.
Apple is a marketing company and eventually inevitably the marketing goes stale and the consumer fad fails and then it is forced to compete on product qualities and price which
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I guess he'll just continue Apple on its present course, just like Steve Ballmer did at Microsoft.
Edit please (Score:1)
Though the lanky 53-year-0ld is reportedly short on small talk, his people skills have earned him a 93 percent approval rating ...
"Th0u9h the 14nky 53-ye4r-01d is rep0rted1y sh0rt 0n sm411 t41k, his pe0p1e ski11s h4ve e4rned him 4 g3 percent 4ppr0val r4tin9."
Probably still some room for improvement, but it's a start!
As a non-fanboy I like the Cook Apple better. (Score:5, Insightful)
I use Apple products, but I'm by no means a fanboy, as my signature suggest (fanboys should NEVER have mod-points). I support Apple products at work, use a 27" iMac at work (which I rather like, and I've put TotalTerminal and other utils on to make it more Linux-like and comfortable for me), and I've got a work iPad 2, all of which I like.
I'm actually a Linux/Android guy.
Why I like Apple better under cook:
Less lawsuits. They're slowly settling/arbitrating old ones and filing less new ones. I developed a deep hatred of Apple under Jobs due to his temper-tantrums and deep ingrained need to shit in everyone else's punch bowls.
I'm seeing less new intenentional handicaps of their own products, and some of the old ones are getting less rigid (iOS is becoming slightly less user-hostile).
They've finally declared hardware the source of their profits and allowed free upgrades to the OS. (I refuse to use the nomenclature of "Free Operating System" that's been used here on Slashdot too damned many time to describe Mavericks since it's still tied to a mandatory purchase to run it)
What Apple still needs to work on:
Drop all user hostility - make so people can release source code for iOS apps they write. Stop attempting to strong-arm exclusivity out of the iOS platform.
ADOPT FRIGGIN NORMAL CABLES FOR YOUR IOS DEVICES
USB-C connectors are on their way, go with those. All the advantages of your Lightning cables but not "just ours".
Give me an editable path bar I can enable (it can be off by default) like every other OS. As a tech moving around yoru file system is more of a pain than it's worth. Don't spout anything at me about using muCommander or something, I'm a tech, I support other peoples stuff and I don't want to install crap or run utilities that have to be imported somehow every time I sit at a different system.
Drop the artificial restrictions on OS updates "when it was manufactured" isn't a good yard-stick for install eligibility and everyone knows it. Those Mac Pros that are six months too old to run Mavericks are more than capable of doing so and everyone knows it, it just makes you look like a bunch of pricks by barring install.
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Oddly enough I have a similar attitude to Apple products, I have them but Unixify them to make them more useful to me.
Not sure we're both looking at the same Apple.
>> Lawsuits
The Samsung one was big enough for a while. Don't see it dying down though...
>> I'm seeing less new intenentional handicaps of their own products, and some of the old ones are getting less rigid (iOS is becoming slightly less user-hostile).
Well I was looking for a new Mac Pro to replace my elderly but functional Mac Pro. I
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a new Mac Pro. I like the CPU options, memory is a bit miserly but I can up that, ah! Hard disk options, external Thunderbolt, dodgy USB 3 or errr.... nothing. Also the internal hard disk was limited to a 256GB SSD. What the fuck is that good for? I want lots of disk all in the same place so I can do lots of database and video work. I don't want to drop another £600 to £1,000 enclosure to get going.
I don't get this. You can daisy chain external hard drives and external monitors to your hearts content. Not sure what you mean by £600 hard drive enclosures, but I think you're doing it wrong.
Re: As a non-fanboy I like the Cook Apple better. (Score:2)
FYI, my company recently purchased a half dozen 4K Dell monitors for our Mac users. They usually growl at us when we walk in with a piece of Dell equipment (since most of our users are fanboys) but are praising us by the time we leave. They are chainable, I discovered this by plugging the computer into the out port by mistake. As far as I know chaining is part of the Display Port spec, and there's no such thing as a Thunderbolt monitor, but I've been wrong before.
They were about $500 each, way less than
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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You know, Apple could chuck the community a bone here and open up their lightning cable specs free from royalties.
It would never catch on because it doesn't support what existing Micro USB connectors do, and what other manufacturers already use. For example, there is no way to do uncompressed 1080p video over it, and phones were doing that three or four years ago so are not likely to drop back now. The cost of the Apple video solution is prohibitive as well, when an MHL adapter is â5.
Lightning doesn't seem to support USB peripherals either. Not sure if it is an inherent limitation of the design or just that Apple
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Re: As a non-fanboy I like the Cook Apple better. (Score:2)
Fanboy, I don't here any really we'll reasoned arguments here, just a bunch of Apple defense. Are you telling me we should go back to COM and LPT ports because those extra wires are there for a reason? Are you going to tell me a comparability checker program is impossible because of support costs? Are you going to tell me the "at your own risk against our advisory" upgrades like the Android community does would break Apple?
Go use your phone with the hole in the cover so the logo shows somewhere else, rea
Re:As a non-fanboy I like the Cook Apple better. (Score:5, Insightful)
ADOPT FRIGGIN NORMAL CABLES FOR YOUR IOS DEVICES USB-C connectors are on their way, go with those. All the advantages of your Lightning cables but not "just ours".
The industry wouldn't bother with USB-c if apple hadn't made lightning. Otherwise regular USB would be "good enough" like it has been for the past decade. Aside from apple the entire electronics industry is about commodity components and a "good enough" attitude about everything.
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Yeah, because USB hadn't already gone through three generations of improvements and refinements before Apple's messianic connector forced the industry to start improving again.
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Otherwise regular USB would be "good enough" like it has been for the past decade.
I don't know how you can look at a Mini USB 3.0 and say that. It's nearly as wide as the old style Apple connector, no USB really did need a Thunderbolt or better treatment, and I hope they stick with it for a while.
Re: USB-C might not be on the way (Score:2)
That's like saying the power of MTV will keep the next Garth Brooks album from coming out because MTV isn't for country.
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" All the advantages of your Lightning cables"
Except for being actually available.
" As a tech moving around yoru file system is more of a pain than it's worth"
"open /path/to/show/in/Finder" from a shell. Or just use the shell and skip the Finder.
"Drop the artificial restrictions on OS updates "when it was manufactured" isn't a good yard-stick for install eligibility and everyone knows it. "
a) If they let you install then people will complain that Apple is deliberately showing their machine down to try to fo
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The thing about these UNIX based system in the modern era - system requirements can actually go down between releases. Draw lines where they need to be, with real specs, not age. I'm running a five year old system at home more powerful than a lot of new stuff, it just takes a little more electricity to run that quad core 64bit Athlon 64 with 8 GB of RAM than if I were to build it today. Apples hardware in the Mac Pro line of the same era had the same type of power my home built system does. Age of hardw
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Drop the artificial restrictions on OS updates "when it was manufactured" isn't a good yard-stick for install eligibility and everyone knows it. Those Mac Pros that are six months too old to run Mavericks are more than capable of doing so and everyone knows it, it just makes you look like a bunch of pricks by barring install.
I don't know about MBPros too old to run Mavericks. I do have a MacBook that runs Mavericks. In fact, I have one of the (very) short run of Aluminum MacBooks that was created in late 2008. Pretty much the oldest MacBooks that runs Mavericks. And the OS is slow as all heck. The system limps by, but I really need to get new hardware to make much use of it.
I can't imagine a hardware version older than that that's capable but Apple won't allow. Likely more pain than it's worth unless you're running only t
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Give me an editable path bar I can enable
Command+Tab > Tab to Finder / Command + SHIFT + G
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I know about this, and I use it, it's how I bring up /etc. Still, a royal pain in comparison to say, Windows 95 B.
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I know about this, and I use it, it's how I bring up /etc. Still, a royal pain in comparison to say, Windows 95 B.
That's about the only thing where W95 is better - and barely at that.
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I find dragging and dropping the my Cups folder to our new systems is the easiest way to setup printers. I've run into some issues with scripting for it on a Mac. I'm sure I could work through it, but that would take a lot of time I don't have.
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Actually, "those Mac Pros" do not contain a 64-bit EFI. The choice was not arbitrary. Apple decided not to deal with the complication of driving a 32-bit EFI with an exclusively 64-bit kernel.
Now, you could still perhaps make the case that since Apple has very deep pockets, they could just throw more engineering time at the problem and do that support anyway. In fact, one dedicated hacker out there managed to create a replacement EFI interface for Mavericks that simply translates most of the vital 64-bit
Innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Innovation (Score:5, Funny)
He's about to release the iPhone Galaxy next month.
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Man, I have no idea what you want from that compan (Score:2)
Man, I have no idea what you want from that company.
Take for example the laptops. Under Big Steve's tenure - which everybody is using as an assumed judgement against Cook - Apple laptops got lighter, much faster, acquired new ports, higher resolution screens, more comfortable sizing, way better battery life, magnetic hinges, laser-drilled microphone ports and power lights, tiny built-in webcams, and a huge raft of software innovation like automatic backups, global search, and ... "widgets".
But they were st
hmm.. (Score:2)
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For a minute there I thought "Hey, I thought I had closed the tab with the Java story". You devil, you. Tricked me out.
An F for not buying Waze (Score:3)
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Buying Waze would not have helped because Waze uses Google data for maps, so presumably would have had to switch to using TomTom/Bing like Apple Maps did. TomTom's data is crap and Bing's search results are average at best, which is why Apple Maps also sucks.
Google's StreetView programme wasn't just about invading everyone's privacy, it was about getting more data on roads than mapping provided at the time. Their systems can read things like street signs, understand road markings, spot where a particular ho
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I don't agree with the Scully comment, but I do like your idea.
Matt
Employee happiness (Score:2)
A CEO that gets it.
Tim Cook realizes he's not Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is perhaps one of three people in the world who can be an asshole and yet get results done (the other two - Linus Torvalds and Theo De Raadt). Say what you want, but they're all assholes, except mysteriously, they get results.
Everyone else who've tried, failed miserably.
And I'm sure Cook realizes it too - he's no Jobs and being an asshole would destroy the company (most who try fail, hence why there's only three people in the world who cou