Apple Succession Planning

I’d love for Cook's successor to bring a humane quality back to Apple’s leadership: Someone nimble, with the capability to meet the outside world at eye level. This may not sound all that CEO-y, but I feel that in the long run, it would serve Apple better than their current, entitlement-driven approach.
Added bonus: Someone with the ability to detect a grand venture clearly gone wrong (say, Liquid Glass) and either drop it or ensure an execution at a far higher quality level.

Sometimes when you laugh at the felt and linen and wood textures, the textures laugh back at you (wrt that @troz mastodon post).

To be fair, I do remember a lot of quality complaints about the tape-reel Podcasts app wigging out back in 2011 or 2012 or whenever it was, but back then, that was the exception and not the norm. There was also the Apple Maps fiasco about that same time, which again, was the exception (but IMO it was also that they just decided to be stupid and release it half-baked instead of giving it another year to refine, or doing some kind of year-long public beta program where you could switch between the map sources).

I have to try to keep this in perspective of what's going on in the Windows world for anyone who isn't running Enterprise edition, but... I agree, they need someone to lay the law down in the software group. Swift (as discussed in the other thread) remains a huge strategical mistake ten years on. I remember Jeff Johnson predicting this, saying that they focused on solving the wrong problems about the platform. Re-inventing all this stuff, rewriting UIKit and AppKit, both which were working perfectly fine, is like saying you're going to make a new browser engine... the bar is way way way too high at this point. The once-in-a-generation man hours/human capital required to build something as sophisticated as AppKit should have never been allowed to be disposed of.

To get out of this mess, they're going to need an absolute toxic bastard to be running software and making those decisions and smacking the living daylights out of the people put Apple in this position wrt to software. I don't know if having a CEO that was a software guy would help, seems to me that it's a talent issue of the bastard kind.

With that said, I'm also kind of surprised Federighi has lasted this long, given the public enough crap running amok under his piece of the Apple pie... it's gonna be a no from me dawg.

I'm starting to think more and more that it takes someone with the force of will and personality like Steve Jobs to be able to keep a company like Apple on track making actually good computing products. I don't really have faith that replacing Tim Cook with someone else, be they a product or software person, is going to right the ship, because they also need to be someone that can keep all of the business and investment people at bay.

The more time goes on, the more I think that Jobs may have been rare in that regard. The fact that he was a product guy was certainly important, and people focus a lot on that, but it I think it's probably the case, as much as I may not like it, that his more negative qualities (the reality distortion field, his general assholery, his narcissism) that allowed him to walk into a room full of shareholders and tell them how things were going to be and that it was going to make them a lot of money without them meddling in his plans.

Given that every publicly traded tech company eventually falls to enshittification -- and please do give me a counter example if one is out there -- it means to me that the forces of investment capitalism generally drive companies to cannibalize themselves. It takes special circumstances to avoid that. And Apple isn't special, at least not any more.

It's not just a matter of will; it's ownership. There will never be another Jobs at Apple because only Jobs and Woz founded Apple. Only they have the kind of ownership of the company that allows them to make the decisions Jobs made.

Cook has a little bit of that because Jobs personally blessed him, but he didn't choose to use it.

There will never be another person leading Apple who will be allowed to behave as Jobs did. From here on out, it will all be maximizing shareholder value until all the actual value is gone.

I don't know if ownership really matters. Jobs was famously kicked out of Apple in spite of being one of the owners. It's sort of a fluke of history that he ended up coming back.

To play devil's advocate to myself, though, maybe him being something of a force of nature really didn't matter either, though, because Jobs came back at Apple's lowest point, and when he left they were still riding high on the outrageous recent success of the iPhone. There was no need to cannibalize anything back then, and shareholders made a killing.

However, I'd argue that Apple hasn't had any new product lines since Jobs left that really mattered. The Apple Watch is a success but hardly another iPhone and the Vision Pro is dead in the water. The only thing that's really grown since Jobs is services, and they're getting shittier and shittier along with everything else as enshittification sits in, though at least for the time being Apple can leverage their market power to squeeze their services even while making them user hostile. We know how this inevitably ends, but for the time being it's maximizing shareholder value.

This very well may have happened under Jobs as well, since he'd still be beholden to keep revenues growing endlessly one way or the other. If he could've avoided it, it might have been his keen instinct for products helping Apple invent something new that was really good.

In order to have a CEO who cares about software they would have to go with an outside hire.

There doesn’t seem to be anyone there who really actually cares about software since Steve Jobs.

Just like the needy software post, a lot of the software now is just there to fulfill corporate goals and not actually for the user.

I would like to see a CEO who cares a lot more about the things only Apple can do and a lot less about making movies and running yet another streaming service.

Rare is the Jobs-like CEO of any large company who will handle the broad responsibilities of that role and also be involved with some of the nitty-gritty areas of execution. There’s no reason to ever expect a CEO to be dual-focused (or dual-capable) like that, and the typical, reasonable expectation is that the CEO is only managing the high-level areas of the company.

In terms of that overarching, top-level management, I only find fault with one area of Cook’s tenure and it’s thus the one I hope is improved by whomever replaces him: hiring/retention of senior leadership. It’s not an area I’ve seen discussed much—I’d hit it hard if I were a tech writer or had time—but I think this has been the weakest part of Cook’s stint. Folks like Ternus are evidence of Cook doing well with hiring, and on the other side there are people like John Browett, who was such a poor fit to head retail that he was replaced within a year. In between those two are plenty of questionable decisions that were Cook’s responsibility.

@NaOH Do we know that Cook was involved in hiring Ternus? He’s been there almost as long as Cook and wasn’t really under him initially.

I don't know if Cook initially hired him—doubtful since Ternus initially came to Apple in 2001—but Cook did promote him a number of times, ultimately to where is now as senior VP of hardware engineering. I give credit to Cook for promoting from within (and retaining) someone like Ternus who seems to do well in his responsibilities. Bad word choice on my part to give Cook credit for his "hiring" when I don't know that and it looks unlikely.