Wesley_Hilliard

discountopinion said:

Hey Jony, here’s a dopey idea - make someone outside of Apple the CEO. Someone who can act as a massive talent magnet in AI. Someone with incredible vision.

i sense that Apple would benefit from a 1997 Steve Jobs like entrance and transformation.

Apple has had decades of incredible profits and share price growth, only to stagnate and likely suffer from common corporate malaise. It would not be hard to imagine most staffers cruise their stock options rather than want to change the world.

Unpopular opinion - poach someone very senior from Tesla.
implement Elons work ethic and relentless innovation ethos.
i doubt you can get Elon but you can potentially get one of his protégées.

So you want to replace the CEO of one of the most profitable and globally popular companies on Earth that continually pumps out astronomically successful products with someone from one of the worst run companies in the history of silicon valley with one of the worst reputations on Earth?

pulseimages said:

Wesley_Hilliard said:

pulseimages said:

Which executive gets Apple back to innovating instead of playing catchup? 

Ok, I'll bite. How is Apple not innovating today? How is it playing catchup? 

Cook has done wonders for the company, like it or not, and the call for the mythical "product focused CEO" is just silly. Any replacement to Cook will have pros and cons. There's always the chance we get someone we've never even heard of.

Apple used to invent product categories now it’s playing catchup with product categories that have been released for years by other companies such as with the Apple Vision Pro and iPhone Fold. 

602warren already got into the inaccuracy of your statement, so no need to reiterate. More importantly, innovation is not invention. Invention can be innovative, but so can iteration.

Apple has always been king of the iteration. It sees what can or does exist and creates an ideal version that people actually want. Apple is almost never first, but it does often achieve best.

I'm still not sure iPhone Fold will ever release. Foldables are an expensive fad with a tiny niche -- a combination that doesn't really work for Apple's iPhone where it is fine with Mac. All the foldables to date are hacky prototypes people spend money on. Android still isn't truly optimized for the experience. And that's where Apple will win if they do release a foldable: the OS will truly be built for the device in a way no other foldable has had.

Apple Vision Pro? While we don't know what Apple's success metric is for the product, they surely crossed it. Compared to the market, it is a much better headset than what competitors offer, and with a price tag that warrants the specs. Meta couldn't hope to compete on the high end, so it doesn't. No one else has built a productivity platform in spatial computing because it is technically difficult to pull off. It's why every other headset focuses on games. As far as I can see, Apple Vision Pro is the only product that exists as a productivity platform, nascent gaming platform, and has high specs and hardware that'll last. Just the price gap alone suggests Apple Vision Pro made plenty of money in its first year compared to the slowly dying Meta Quest platform. We've only just begun to see what Apple is doing in the space, meanwhile Meta's entire financial backing is focused on pursuing another fictional technology.

pulseimages said:

Which executive gets Apple back to innovating instead of playing catchup? 

Ok, I'll bite. How is Apple not innovating today? How is it playing catchup? 

mikethemartian said:

Stabitha_Christie said:

After the disaster that was the whole Metaverse, this just smells of desperation. Disaster is being generous, did anything come of the Metaverse other than the announcement? Anyway, so they are buying all the talent they can get but what is the vision? Their existing platforms, Facebook + Instagram, have become overrun by AI slop. So the plan is to make more slop creation tools? You can't hire your way into great products, you have to have an idea of what you are going to do. Zuck has proven that he isn't the idea guy, everything he has was stolen or purchased. 

Compared to the commercial success of the Vision Pro?

Actually yes. The Metaverse is an unmitigated disaster, as will the pursuit of the fictional technology "Artificial Superintelligence," or whatever dumb name and goalpost they have this week.

The Apple Vision Pro exists, it works really well, and you can buy it in store right now. Apple has sold north of 600k units at this point at that price and design. We can't determine if it is a success or failure because we don't know Apple's win/lose conditions. For all we know, it's doing what they expected it to do as a first-generation $3,500 face computer.

But, given one product exists and the other doesn't I'd say there's really no comparison here.

9secondkox2 said:

blastdoor said:

For any successful CEO close to retirement, their most important remaining job is working with the board to find successor candidates. Steve Jobs did his job well — he picked Cook. One thing that is especially remarkable about Jobs’ pick is that Cook is very different from Jobs. It would be very tempting to pick a “mini me” as a replacement. For Jobs, that might have been Ive. But because Jobs cared more about Apple than his ego, he picked someone very different from himself because he knew that is what Apple needed next. And Jobs was right Cook was great for Apple in the ten years after Jobs left. 

But Cook is no longer the best leader for Apple and Apple does not need a mini Cook as the next CEO. So Cook needs to find the right yin to his yang to be the next CEO.

Perhaps bringing Ive back would accomplish that. Definitely fits the “product guy” and “yin” role. 

Hard to see Ternus in the CEO role. Williams did seem like a fantastic fit (though I did not like him in the design lead role). Williams was like the genius who would never beat down anyone with his brain. He came across very blue collar, yet wielded the Ivy League intellect. The kind of guy, similar to Steve, to take the high and mighty concepts, tech, and prowess of Apple, and make it feel as comfortable and at-home as your dog curled up next to you on the couch. 

The little I know of Khan does not strike me as a good CEO successor as far as company product strategy . But he could surprise. He seems better suited to the COO role as Apple endeavors to build out manufacturing and sales ties with India. Not sure how his efforts with other nations have resulted. So he could just be an interim fill-in for Jeff or he could turn out to be a sleeper hit. He’s an ops guy with a mechanical engineering education. But his expertise is supply chain. Just like Cook. It does appear that msnuevering him into Jeff’s place sets him up as the CEO successor, but that leaves me a little concerned that he may end up being “discount Tim Cook” and have the same kind of leadership back to back. Not sure if that’s the best move forward after the current “supply chain guy” leadership.  He has a few years to show everyone what he can do. Maybe after Steve, that’s what will continue the journey? Or is it time for a  product visionary, with the ops guys bringing his visions to life? 

Look, I know you didn't mean to, but suggesting Sabih Khan is strategic for Apple's push into India is teetering on racist. Did Cook being white make him better suited for dealing with the EU? Do we need a Chinese COO to help with China? These people are good at their job because of their qualifications and Sabih Khan is likely to be just as effective as Williams as he's spent years preparing for this role under his tutelage. He was likely a prospect well before Apple's more recent push into India considering the guy has been at Apple since 1995.

And you clearly understand that and weren't trying to insinuate anything. I'm not flagging this as an inappropriate comment, just sharing the mistake you made without realizing it.