Oof. This article gets so much wrong…
> The rot starts when the salespeople end up running the company.
> Then, in 2011, Apple promoted its head of operations to CEO.
Tim Cook is not and never has been a salesperson. Head of operations at a company like Apple is a deeply technical role. That’s why he has a degree in industrial engineering and an MBA.
> Today’s Apple doesn’t pass that test. And the failures aren’t dramatic ones. They’re the small, persistent, daily-friction kind that the founder used to personally drive teams to fix.
Today’s Apple struggles to ship software to more than 2 billion devices and get all the integrations working smoothly. The Apple of the past a) had lots of similar problems every once in a while even under jobs b) never had to deal with this scale. The correct benchmark isn’t Apple of the past but of similarly sized companies like Google and Microsoft.
> and it visibly hated them. The bad release, the launch-day disaster, the public mea culpa, the engineering re-org. The whole company would visibly recoil and try to do better.
Apple has had one badly received and widely panned software release (and honestly I haven’t really had the problems others complained about, but I waited until a few dot releases).
> But here’s the thing about hardware. You can grow it through operational discipline. You can squeeze a process node, you can negotiate a better deal with TSMC, you can lean on a thousand suppliers until they bend. That’s exactly the kind of work Cook is good at, and it’s exactly the kind of work that doesn’t require a product person at the top.
Sounds like the author doesn’t have hands on experience building hardware.
Finally, I’ll note they promoted a hardware engineer to CEO. If the CEO role was so critical to good software then a software person would have been a better pick. A CEO role is different and good product taste is a fickle bitch - even Johnny Ives was struggling there.