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

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

#191

Post by ben_jones »

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…

"A man with principles" TM.

Do we really know the content of people's characters based solely on what we hear in tech blogs and popular media? Was superior security/privacy/whatever not a selling point for Apple since "lol Mac's don't get viruses"?

I'm not saying Tim Cook is bad, I'm just saying how do we know billionaire execs with PR teams and heavy financial incentives to seem good are in fact good? Did this not bite people in the ass with Holmes?

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

#192

Post by Spooky23 »

ncallaway wrote: post #82
Spooky23 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is, like it was the first time around, a really speculative bet that will probably disappoint. IMO, Apple's approach is more honest and has a clear path to profitability. Everyone else is promising the world and not delivering much at all.

This is the truly hard thing with disruptive innovation. It looks like nothing at all, until it suddenly disrupts everything. It's easy to spot with hindsight, but at the time it's not at all clear what's disruptive and what's nothing.

We'll see. Sometimes it's a bunch of hype and horseshit too.

Apple can provide most of the consumer services on the devices without external services. There's a risk that they cannot execute, but there's a real risk to the Google approach too -- swaths of the business can be wiped out by regulatory action.

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

#193

Post by josu »

protomyth wrote: post #145
josu wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>He mostly got hate because people hated Microsoft. I believe that the hypothesis of the article is that people hated Microsoft because of Ballmer.

Mr. Gates was in charge when Microsoft did quite a bit of their hated activities. It was Gates as CEO who rigged it so all of us buying a PC to run a different OS had to pay for Windows.

Apple also did a fair share of evil things, but it managed to be viewed as cool rather than evil.

However, it is obvious that we are talking about subjective things here, and establishing causality is certainly not easy.

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

#194

Post by mikhailt »

kimar wrote: post #32

Funny that the article fails to mention Jony Ive as the obvious successor to Cook. Doesn't it look like Apple has its next "creative CEO" all prepped up?

I'm curious you think it is "obvious"? I've never heard anyone say this of Ive until now with your comment.

Jobs did make sure Apple has no power to ever get rid of Ive for any reason, ensuring him an unbreakable tenure. However, to me, it's far more obvious that he will never take on the CEO role because I think he's prepping to retire from Apple in the next few years as there's a reason we've been seeing less and less of him over the past few years, with his strong desire to move back to England with his family and so on.

The only two people that's more obvious to me is Williams and Schiller but I don't think Cook is going to be gone for another decade.

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

#195

Post by alex- »

Crespyl wrote: post #190
alex- wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author called out, specifically, how Azure was in his opinion keeping Microsoft relevant "Nadella got Microsoft organized around mobile and the cloud (Azure), freed the Office and Azure teams from Windows, killed the phone business and got a major release of Windows out without the usual trauma. And is moving the company into augmented reality and conversational AI. While they’ll likely never regain the market do…

> a major release of Windows out without the usual trauma What trauma-less release would this be?

Satya Nadella was appointed as CEO on 4 February 2014.

The last 2 windows releases were:

Windows 10, released on the 29 July 2015

Windows 8.1, released on the 17 October 2013

So it is safe to assume that the author was referring to the Windows 10 release

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_vers...

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

#196

Post by jomamaxx »

cm2187 wrote: post #76

My opinion is that the failure of Microsoft has less to do with Ballmer than with the absence of a Steve Jobs. My experience with large corporations is that they naturally produce mediocrity. The ownership of the final product or service is too diluted, with too many people involved, pulling in too many conflicting directions. They employ people who individually know what "good" means and what should be done in an id…

Large corps may produce mediocrity, but the issue for MS is not so much that - they have talent, and are operationally effective.

I think large corps fail to grasp industry pivots - and they keep doing 'more of same' - failing to take risks on new, emerging concepts.

Part of this is 'baked in' - large, incumbent entities have more to lose than to gain by innovation.

Protecting MS monopoly is easier than taking the risk of heading in a new direction that does not pan out. Very, very few companies can do it well.

Amazon did a great job with AWS - but that was a spin-off of something they already used internally, so it had at least one 'satisfied real world customer' in a way.

Also - consider Apple without the iPhone. They just would not be what they are. The iPhone was a rare win, and it had a lot to do with leap-frogging BlackBerry - who created the market demand for data services. Were it not for BB making ridiculous amounts of surplus profits, Jobs would have not been able to justify to himself a $200M investment in the iPhone. Of course - MS should have seen this and acted more aggressively on creating a better experience - they missed it.

In the end I think Cook came up through the ranks of Ops, and is a trusted maintainer of the system. Ballmer is a loud, boorish Trump-like figure who I don't think was very liked.

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

#197

Post by eyelidlessness »

mikeryan wrote: post #183
intoverflow2 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> announced very few new products. Look it up, he's actually announced plenty. Just they're kinda underwhelming. Off the top of my head: MacBook, Mac Pro, iPad Pro, iPhone+,MacBook HDMI Dongle, iPhone Headphone Dongle, Apple Pay, Apple Music, Apple Pencil.

MacBook, Mac Pro, iPad Pro, iPhone+,MacBook HDMI Dongle, iPhone Headphone Dongle, Apple Pay, Apple Music, Apple Pencil. These are primarily iterations or extensions of existing products, not new products (in the blue ocean sense) as seem to be defined in the article. This is the complaint the article makes with "execution" executives. As products they're all mechanisms for increasing revenues on existing (re: stagnan…

> These are primarily iterations or extensions of existing products, not new products

Some much more than others. If you apply this logic consistently, the only new products Steve Jobs introduced were the original Apple (II), the Mac operating systems, the iPod and iOS. Everything else was an iteration, right?

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

#198

Post by dcole2929 »

usaphp wrote: post #157
chongli wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gamers are high end consumers They really aren't. PC gamers hang out on Reddit and other forums trading info about how to build a PC from commodity parts in order to get the absolute best price/performance ratio. It's not hard at all to put together a machine for less than a thousand dollars that would be competitive with the machines Apple sells for three thousand. There's no margin for Apple in this space.

> "It's not hard at all to put together a machine for less than a thousand dollars that would be competitive with the machines Apple sells for three thousand." That's a complete BS, I want you to give me an example of that. Less than a thousand dollar desktop vs 3000$ mac. Now re laptops. My PC friends keep telling me that MacBooks are overpriced And that you can get a faster PC laptop for half the price, but as soon…

it's actually pretty easy. The biggest cost associated with building a new computer are cpu/gpu. A half decent mb goes for around 150. $700 worth of cpu/gpu will let you place most anything out on high settings. Yeah if you are looking for a titan you're gonna end up paying more than $1000 but even still that computer is going to absolutely take any high end mac desktop to the wood shed for still probably half the price

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

#199

Post by MarkMc »

the_watcher wrote: post #90
protomyth wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, Ballmer got hate because Microsoft's consumer products consistently flopped. The stuff that those of us who flipped to Apple while he was in charge used (Zune, Windows Vista, original Surface, Windows Phone) were consistently underwhelming. However, Ballmer was simply inarguably an effective CEO from the perspective of investors. He grew the enterprise business consistently (which has a huge amount of value for l…

> Ballmer was simply inarguably an effective CEO from the perspective of investors.

I'm not so sure. Imagine Microsoft had a lazy/disciplined CEO who said, "Windows and Office development only. No Bing, no XBox, no Azure, no Windows Phone, no Nokia". Would the shareholders be richer now?

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

#200

Post by ncallaway »

Spooky23 wrote: post #192
ncallaway wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the truly hard thing with disruptive innovation. It looks like nothing at all, until it suddenly disrupts everything. It's easy to spot with hindsight, but at the time it's not at all clear what's disruptive and what's nothing.

We'll see. Sometimes it's a bunch of hype and horseshit too. Apple can provide most of the consumer services on the devices without external services. There's a risk that they cannot execute, but there's a real risk to the Google approach too -- swaths of the business can be wiped out by regulatory action.

> Sometimes it's a bunch of hype and horseshit too.

Yes, I apologize if I wasn't clear. My point was that it's hard to see what is disruptive technology and what is nothing. Plenty of things labelled as disruptive end up as nothing. Plenty of things labelled as nothing end up as disruptive.

I was just saying it's never easy to tell which is which.

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