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.