One of the biggest tech stories this month was related to Apple CEO Tim Cook’s decision to step down after 15 years leading Apple into a future without Steve Jobs. Many business articles are reducing his time down to the bullet point of how he grew Apple’s market cap from $350 billion to an estimated $4 trillion today. Adweek takes a deeper dive into the ups and downs of his tenure, which included very little in terms of real product innovation but a relentless focus on growing services and cutting costs. Looking back, AdWeek suggests his biggest miss may be when it comes to AI:
“Every company has to be on top and ahead with AI. But it’s particularly crucial for Apple, whose brand is built on three pillars: simplicity, humanity, and creativity. It should have led into the AI era. Instead, Siri is an idiot in a classroom filled with geniuses. And there appears to be little if any plan to fix things any time soon. The honest assessment: Cook is a superb operator and a competent strategist who has been a mediocre product visionary.”
Conversely, this lack of product vision and caution-led approach (particularly when it comes to privacy) is being held up by other critics as Cook’s biggest achievement. Indeed, Cook’s greatest legacy may be how he took a brand that was legendary because of a visionary founder … and managed to make it ordinary and every day without killing it. Apple products were once luxurious, fashionable, beautiful, high-end, game-changing status symbols sought after by tech-obsessed early adopters. A decade and a half later as Cook leaves his mark, Apple makes every day, mostly average products following innovative ideas pioneered by competitors, and benefit primarily from trapping consumers into loyalty through the notoriously closed ecosystem they themselves created and their continually profitable app store monopoly.
Now that John Ternus (often described as a “product guy“) is set to take over in September, the big question the industry is wondering is whether Apple will continue to maintain its current success as a fast follower or whether we may see a return to new and bolder bets when the company goes under new leadership.