Short Notes on Tech: Tim Cook is the Bill Gates of Apple

Writing this right after the announcement of iPhoneX, criticism of Apple is easy to find. A lot of people are writing and sharing their doubts. The most recent article I loved was about how Apple is losing its charm. It reminded me of a former employee who said it’s changed from being an innovation machine to a “boring operations company”.

Yet for all the criticism, the company’s core strategy is on the mark. Cook has developed AR to the point that Apple is in the lead. Plus, the Apple Watch Series 3 will mend the biggest issue with the Watch — it can now make calls!

As far as both these technologies go, we are essentially in Star Trek territory. My hope for the Watch S3 is the device requires no tethering at all, and that it will become the iPhone replacement we have been waiting for.

The company is delivering the future, imperfectly. Its strengths and weaknesses are made obvious in the iPhone X’s “unibrow” and FaceID. With reports that edge-to-edge TouchID was cancelled because they couldn’t get it to work right, it seems like compromises were done for the sake of a timely release. As far as the unibrow goes, it’s the kind of an aesthetic compromise for the sake of functionality that Steve Jobs avoided.

Yet comparisons between Tim Cook and Steve Jobs are unhelpful, not because Steve Jobs was a genius (I’m not sure he was) but because Steve was in personal computing since the very beginning. He had plenty of time to learn. He was a billionaire by the time he was 30, and in the next 10 years he learnt how to run a company by burning his own money at both NeXt and Pixar. He learnt the way we all learn — by failing.

By the time he came back to Apple, he was pretty good, sometimes supernaturally so. The idea that Tim Cook should match his record there is unreasonable. Cook is running the first company he’s ever been CEO of, and he’s doing it really well.

At the moment, the competitive landscape for Apple is clear of obstacles. There is no obvious way to disrupt the iPhone, particularly now that VR has fizzled out. AR is a far better potential for the mass market, and Apple has taken the lead.

Instead of thinking of Tim as the “Steve Ballmer” of Apple, taking over from its brilliant founder, I see him more and more as Apple’s version of Bill Gates — A stable and awkward leader adeptly managing the biggest tech company on Earth. The “taste” that Jobs used to talk about might not be so strong in its products, but business is booming.

But of course these are analogies and simplifications. Tim Cook is his own man and we are talking about 2017, not 1997. But it might help Apple’s case to think that the closest analogue we have to its current CEO is Bill Gates, who ran one of the most successful businesses in history.