Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple

steveblank.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 307 posts

Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple

#41

Post by nucotano »

tkinom wrote: post #38
pyrophane wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? I personally don't like all the pre-installed and unremovable stuff like Xbox, the fact that turning off Cortana is now really difficult, and how many knobs you have to turn to keep the os from sending everything you type to MS. Is that what's is ruining it, or is there something else?

It is easy to use Windows Firewall to block XBox, Cotana, etc from access Internet. I blocked all windows 10 services (svrhost) layer from Internet except DNS and NTP. In my windows 10 system, only firefox get to the net unrestricted. After that, windows 10 is actually a joy to use.

I did that, but it meant I couldn't use Bing anymore (I like it because I can use the "ip:" search operator to find domains hosted on a certain ip address).

Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple

#42

Post by [deleted] »

bad_user wrote: post #12

The article is short on details why he thinks Tim Cook is like Steve Ballmer, except for saying that Apple is slowly missing the boat on AI. I don't know what Amazon does for AI, I haven't seen anything convincing from them, but I'll trust the author that they are working on it. However it's tough to beat Google in this space, because AI and machine learning is what Google has focused on since their beginnings . Goog…

[deleted]

Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple

#43

Post by zekevermillion »

protomyth wrote: post #15
zekevermillion wrote: post #11

Even if I generally agree with disappointment at the apparent "maintenance mode" of Apple's product line, I am not sure Ballmer is the best analogy. My understanding is that Tim Cook actually is responsible for many of the supply chain innovations behind Apple's dominant product lines. This is an incredibly hard technical feat, not just blustery MBA crap. I suppose it remains to be seen whether Apple can put its enor…

If you take a look back, Steve Ballmer was responsible for a lot of the success of Microsoft. He mostly got hate because people hated Microsoft. I'm don't think Ballmer's list of accomplishments at Microsoft is fully appreciated particularly compared to the good press Tim Cook as enjoyed.

I don't have anything personal against Ballmer. Would be interested to know more about his role in building MS.

Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple

#44

Post by samastur »

LaSombra wrote: post #30
bischofs wrote: post #10

Tim Cook is a "Bozo" - He has moved the focus away from computers and the companies core professional users and turned Apple into a fashionable health services company. They will coast for a while on their dominant mobile market share but eventually the stagnation and lack of new products will catch up to them. He built a watch, which was a "me too" product and answered a question that no one asked. Jobs would never…

This image http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2015/10/slide-06... , to me, simbolizes the recent Apple.

Magic Mouse happened on Jobs' watch.

Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple

#45

Post by IBM »

bischofs wrote: post #35
zekevermillion wrote: post #11

Even if I generally agree with disappointment at the apparent "maintenance mode" of Apple's product line, I am not sure Ballmer is the best analogy. My understanding is that Tim Cook actually is responsible for many of the supply chain innovations behind Apple's dominant product lines. This is an incredibly hard technical feat, not just blustery MBA crap. I suppose it remains to be seen whether Apple can put its enor…

Generally speaking a product company can't thrive off supply chain innovations. The market will move to commodification at some point.

If this were true Apple shouldn't be able to sell computers for a premium, and yet they do. 40 years should have been enough for commodification to take effect.

Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple

#46

Post by apozem »

Roritharr wrote: post #13
bad_user wrote: post #12

The article is short on details why he thinks Tim Cook is like Steve Ballmer, except for saying that Apple is slowly missing the boat on AI. I don't know what Amazon does for AI, I haven't seen anything convincing from them, but I'll trust the author that they are working on it. However it's tough to beat Google in this space, because AI and machine learning is what Google has focused on since their beginnings . Goog…

> He's a man with principles and for this I appreciate him a lot, maybe more than I ever appreciated Steve Jobs. Is he really? I mean from a strategic point of view he currently only has to gain from giving that outward appearance. Occam's Razor tells me that he is just luckily able to tread the high road because for him its the one without toll booths.

You can interpret public stances of principle as various ways of making money in the long term, but I do buy that Tim Cook cares about doing the right thing in some areas.

> (An) NCPPR representative asked Mr. Cook to commit right then and there to doing only those things that were profitable.

What ensued was the only time I can recall seeing Tim Cook angry, and he categorically rejected the worldview behind the NCPPR's advocacy. He said that there are many things Apple does because they are right and just, and that a return on investment (ROI) was not the primary consideration on such issues.

"When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI." He said that the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader.

https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/tim-cook-soundly-rej...

Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple

#47

Post by bnegreve »

Luck is generally involved in success.

So maybe this is just regression toward the mean and hasn't that much to do with whoever is the CEO.

In other words, every very successful company is bound to be less successful later. Nothing really exciting about this.

Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple

#48

Post by angstrom »

pyrophane wrote: post #24
nucotano wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't he kind of ruining Windows?

How so? I personally don't like all the pre-installed and unremovable stuff like Xbox, the fact that turning off Cortana is now really difficult, and how many knobs you have to turn to keep the os from sending everything you type to MS. Is that what's is ruining it, or is there something else?

That's been the argument since Windows XP and to a lesser extend Windows 98SE were released. Too much has been added! From my experience the thing I dislike about Windows 10 is how often I find myself using WidnowsKey+X to use it.

Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple

#49

Post by sbuttgereit »

nucotano wrote: post #17
LaSombra wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think sometimes you have to break it to make it good/great again, like the first Mac OS X release. That's my 2¢. The fact that Microsoft is increasing revenue on Azure, for example, shows they are jumping on a bandwagon that should give them another revenue stream that they can use to reinvest. I might be wrong, but that's how I see it.

Well, I'm going to be honest here, I don't give two shits about Azure. Not only because I don't use that (I don't run any system, etc) but because there are dozens of providers. Unfortunately Windows is one of a kind, so if he ruins it (and 10 is definitely a step back from 8.1, from what I've seen) he's ruined something really important for some of us, something with no known replacement. (No, OS X and Linux don't c…

As someone that primarily uses windows, that's not my experience at all.

Windows 7 was great; Windows 8 was a parade of misguided user experience experiments, Windows 8.1 was at best a patch over 8 (I still needed third party extensions to make the experience decent).

Windows 10, I no longer need third party extensions, I no longer need the VMs for Linux that I use to keep around with the WSL. Honestly, I've been pleased on the whole.

We can talk about privacy and the biggest misfeature that has cropped up in Windows 10 (automatic upgrades, especially automatic restarts... which I've since disabled)... but on just day-in-day-out user experience Windows 10 is vastly superior as compared to Windows 8.x.

Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple

#50

Post by kbenson »

egwynn wrote: post #16
bshimmin wrote: post #6

Apologies for this most gratuitous of bikeshedding, but if you're going to use proper superscripts, please sort out the line-heights.

I’ve never thought of this and never noticed it until you pointed it out. And now it’ll probably bother me forever.

I was going to say it's probably like vocal fry, where once you hear it you're supposed to hear it everywhere, but I've never heard it myself. In making sure I remembered the name right and googling it, I found a video and I was able to hear it fairly clearly for the first time. Now I'm afraid I've inflicted myself with this. :/
Post reply on HN