Tim Cook looks to mold a more streamlined Apple - Page 3

Should the stock actually go up, in theory? The book value of a company should be priced into the stock, right? If Apple were to give the $80B to charity their stock should fall, if they spend the $80B on a buy back, the fall in the stock price caused by the money on hand falling is balanced, in theory, by the buy back.

I see buy backs as huge wastes of money from the corporations point of view.

When a company buys back its stock, it's a sign of confidence in the future. Market sentiment alone puts upward price pressure on the stock in the near term. Also, you have to look at what it means -- the company feels its own stock is a better bet with its capital than any other investment. Unless it's a company on its last legs, making a desperate move to push its stock higher, you can almost always bet on good things in the future for the company.

I have to agree this is not good, I am going to keep a close eye on these changes since I may need to dump my investments if this kind of activities continue. This is exactly what happen when steve left the last time, Sculley and other senior management put levels in to separate themselves from the people with the ideas and doing the work since they could not understand what they were doing.

Cooks is obviously doing this because he probably read it in a book. The big different between Steve and others is Steve knew what was going on in the company, he would go to the sources and told the sources what needed to be done, no chain of command structure. Cook is putting in a classic chain of command since people who do not have a vision need it in place to understand what is going on.

I don't see where the article says Cook is separating himself from the workers. If anything, he is empowering people, which is a total 180 from the way Jobs ran the ship. Under Cook's watch, Apple is almost certainly a much better place to work, and happy employees make good products.

Your post makes sense only if you decide that enterprise is going to keep buying boatloads of PCs. My Fortune 50 company has been rapidly replacing PCs with VDI boxes for several years now, and the new mobile tablet devices make that even easier. If you look at some of the corporate analyses, even Gartner is predicting that there is a new enterprise paradigm in the offing and it has Apple stamped clearly on it. With Apple products currently in study phase or being deployed in all of the Fortune 50 and most of the Fortune 500 companies, you have de facto support for enterprise already in place for Apple without all of the nonsense that traditional vendor relationships require. My own company has a large number of developer teams already building out corporate App Store controls, utilities and apps for our operations, without requiring massive ammounts of effort to support by Apple. Since all of these items are owned by the company, support stays internalized and controlled without requiring Apple to provide the kind of hand-holding required from Microsoft, for example. It's a whole different approach and it works extremely well here.

I think you are being very myopic in thinking that enterprise requires "trucks" for all of its needs. Most workers need email access, intra/internet access, systems access, and processing capacity for documents, spreadsheets and the odd database operations. That is all fully provisioned via VDI and can be delivered on a dumb box or mobile device. The only addition to a tablet approach we see is a keyboard, and I just walk in to a conference and jack into the projector using HDMI and deliver. Time to get out of your 20th century mindset and wake up to the 21st century you're living in.

This quote really bothers me: "tell me again how this helps me sell more phones?".

Typically, this effect is short-lived. It is a short-term gimmick for companies needing to placate shareholders (often one or two institutions, in order to ensure their support at SHAs). In the long term, investing in the company rather than financial gimmicks is always the better way to go.


The price per share will go up because there are fewer shares to go around. This has been proven over time. But many factors, including the drop in cash holdings, will bring it down eventually if the company is not performing.

The fact is that it is unnecessary to do a stock buyback. Apple has proven that the stock takes care of itself if you execute on making and marketing great products. If Tim Cook forgets this lesson, shame on him.

Yep, that's the only thing that bothers me, too.

It screams Scully.

Another corporate-level change is recently-announced charitable matching program that calls for Apple to match employee donations up to $10,000 per year, a change from the Jobs who was reportedly against giving money away.

That is a nice change. It is always good to give back to the community.

Change was thrust upon Apple with the departure of Steve Jobs. When you lose a central person like that, is it any wonder that the company would HAVE to restructure a bit as a result? Apple knows they can't just "tap" an individual to be the new Steve Jobs. Failing that, the duties and reporting structures that were attached to Steve are forced to change.

In my opinion, the changes that Tim Cook is instituting are motivated by that. I suspect that he is trying to do it in a minimally invasive way.

Thompson

Much bemused by the delayed reaction to Steve's death. So, the reality is sinking in now , huh?

Aw, just give the 'new' guy a chance. He's only been running things since 2006 or so.

People aren't going to stop buying Apple products anytime soon. There's a long line of exciting products finalizing development. Cook can execute. Apple is a sticky ecosystem. .

Seriously are you guys trying to talk Apple into a funk? find something else to do. It's a big amazing world out there.

All companies take on the feel of there CEO's

Apple as we knew it gone just as Mr. Job's is gone, period.

I worry about the future of Apple like the next guy, but there is nothing that can be done.

This is a new Apple and the changes he is making are striking.

Mr. Ive's will be the odd man out, the lone voice so to speak.

My gut tells me the day's of corp executives getting a huge payday are about to begin.

For years they have had to bow to the seat of Mr. Job's and wait for his approval, thats was his Type A personality.

They loved there leader but I would be willing to bet there was some quiet animosity there.

Look at it as a mob mentality, with out Mr. Jobs to lay and enforce the law they will start re-writing laws as they see fit and how it benefits them.

I have lived thru multiple corporations that have there founder no longer a part of the company and it takes very little time for what I stated above to happen.

Even with the most loyal follower with in the company.

My hope is that the foundation Mr. Job's built can with stand this 3 to 5 year onslaught.

If so then new blood can take over with new vision and creativity.

Heres to hoping I am wrong...

Fist off, the 'tell me how this sells more iphones' quote is so without context that it's impossible to say what's really going on there. As someone who's spent a decade at Apple, on teams reporting up to Tim, I can tell you first-hand that he know's what the heck is going on and probably has less patience with underperformance and time-wasting endeavors than Steve did so I'm guessing he was making someone explain the reasons for wanting to spend time on a particular project. One of the things I'm sure he's dealing with is how Apple's (unparalleled) growth has affected it's organization and no doubt he is doing what he needs to do to make it work. Apple will be fine with Cook at the helm (as long as Ive stays, of course)

Also, don't let Tim Cook's soft spoken nature fool you. There will be zero f-ing around at Apple.

Is there a way to find out who is ignoring ME?

Watch out, given the attitudes of some people here, that statement might be considered controversial, even political!

Welcome!

Are Apple employees actually allowed to participate in forums like this?

Tim Cook received 12.3M in stock for the good work he did taking over for Steve in 2009. He made 59M last year between salary, stock and bonuses and when they made him CEO, they gave him 1M shares of stock. I don't think he's worried too much about what his specific salary will be as CEO.

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.


Once they find out who he is, he'll be fired, particularly since he's a higher-up. They're allowed to read, not post.

He was speaking in the past tense. Likely he no longer is an Apple employee.

He used "who's". He used it incorrectly, but he used it. That implies 'who has', 'not who had', meaning ongoing.

you an insider now?

I so wish.

"Yeah, that way you'd be overcome with a self-righteous sense of morality and wouldn't post anymore!"

No.

Interesting (in a bad way) that there's no Senior Vice President of Computer Software - there's one for Internet Software and one for iOS Software.

The one area Apple has gone downhill in is its computer software - lots of mistakes and bad design decisions.

I just posted the same idea before reading yours. Well, it's worth saying again - Apple needs to improve and tighten up its computer software development.

I took another look. You're right.

As long as Ive, Schiller and Forstall are at high levels and never leave the company - I have faith in Apple. If more than one of them leaves then my faith declines greatly.

Because Steve's genius and personality, while it made Apple the incredible success it is today, also hurt Apple and its employees in some respects and what we don't know is how many great minds Apple lost because they didn't want to deal with Steve's tantrums and behavior, which in any other company, could be considered to be "hostile working conditions."

Especially because Steve is gone, it is important for Apple to retain its best employees. If Cook improves communication and makes it more pleasant to work at Apple, I think that's a good thing.

My question is this: While Ive is there to drive industrial design, who is the person at Apple who drives new product ideas? Who decides how the next generation OS is going to work? Who decides if the iOS and OS X should be merged or separated? Who is strategizing on what OS XI should be? Who is creating whatever new product comes after the iPhone, whether it's a television or something else? These are the things that Steve was great at. If Tim Cook is not a "product guy", then he needs someone at the most senior level aside from Ive who is.

This is a valuable perspective on that shred of a quote that was missing from anybody else's handwringing over it here. How could anyone presume to worry about it without knowing even the basic context, not to mention any of the ten or so imaginable subtle contexts?


Actually he used "who's" correctly. In the next phrase, "know's" is not correct.

There's no subject-verb agreement. You think it's correct because that's how people talk now, which is wrong grammatically.


Thought I'd give him a pass on that.

Well, you're the last someone whom I'd argue with. And I doubt there's anyone around here who's willing to either.

If anyone's out there who'd like to mediate, he or she'd be doing us a favor.

Please explain...

I find it slow,I find it locks my Mac up quite a lot, I find it heavy, there is too many functions in the one App, I think they should have continued on the iTunes for media, iSync for syncing route. One example is, why do they release a whole new copy of iTunes for a new iPod, why?

New hardware uses new USB profiles. The software must be updated to know how to see them, how to sync to them, and how to manage their software and hardware configurations.

If it's slow for you, there's something wrong with your Mac. I've never had an iTunes lock-up, and I've been using it since day one on several different machines. iTunes is one of the sleekest, most efficient apps that exists for OS X.

It's fully-functional aspect is its greatest strength. I don't need a bunch of different apps that do all kind of things, everything is right there. That's my biggest beef with the iOS implementation of it, I have to keep going back and forth between different apps to do things that are integrated on the desktop version. I have to use two different apps to use different episodes of the same podcast feed!

There are plenty of bad apps out there, OS X's iTunes is not one of them. It's one of the very best apps that exists for any purpose.

Syncing? OF COURSE that should be in iTunes. That's where the library that I'm syncing from is! It allows me to control what I want and how I want it. If anything, iCloud is the problem. It should have just been a feature of iTunes. If you are logged to your iTunes account, you could just check off cloud sync, and it's done. The way it is now, there are all kinds of people who can't even figure out how to sign up for iCloud, never mind use it.

So if they had a seperate app for syncing they would only need to update it, not the entire iTunes apps

I've been through this with you guys tonnes of times, I'm sick of it. I find iTunes crap. There is nothing wrong with my Mac other than it being over 6 months old. If you have a number of items in your library it slows down a lot, and it has been getting slower and slower for the last number of releases, version 7 and 8 were ok, 9 started going downhill.


I don't own any iOS devices, I'll have to take your word on it.


That's your opinion, you are welcome to it, but I insist you know that your opinion is wrong.


Why should syncing be in iTunes? That is one of the reasons iTunes is getting so far, more and more stuff is thrown at it. You don't sync constantly, it doesn't need to be open constantly, a small application that does nothing by syncing is fine. And I don't really care about iCloud, my iPod classic can't use it, my capped internet connection has no want to use it

I have 20,995 items in my iTunes library (363.14 GB). How many more until I start to see it slow down?

When you hit a terabyte total, you start to see it slow down.

Mine is over 1TB