DitheringHobo

@Neil, bravo for using the word 'hogwash'. I thought it was just dinosaurs like me with a penchant for the archaic. Such is the lack of nuanced argument these days that I'm forced to agree with you that much of the criticism levelled at Cook is overcooked – (thank you) – after all, Steve Jobs was a hard act to follow for any successor. But, there is an inherent lunacy in trusting using metrics alone as the measure of worth or value. Company valuations are the most notorious of them all along with market position, dominance, share price and profitability. IBM had all this as it began its descent and was toppled by the fruity one. I doubt anyone would argue that Cook lacks the talismanic qualities of his predecessor (as do other CEOs), but you only need to examine Cook's tenure to see that he has more in common with other blue chips CEOs than not. He became CEO of a company with a creative portfolio not seen before and has coasted on that momentum ever since. The Apple Watch owes its origin to the iPhone/iPad – shrinking the form factor was hardly an imaginative leap. Apple's forays into headphones was enabled through a company takeover where the innovation was brought in. Apple entering the Services space was sound business diversification, no doubt, but calculated to shore up Apple's bottom line by emulating the model used by other companies i.e. hardly innovative. One salutes the move to Apple silicon because this is a genuine leap, but this was a fortuitous outcome of a step that was motivated to control costs in the supply chain, not an innovative quest to break new frontiers (as before). Cook's tenure has also seen the company's OS releases decline in quality significantly. Mercifully for Cook, that earlier product portfolio is so strong that none of the problems during the Cook era have hurt that earlier momentum. Yes, Cook is no vanilla CEO. He stands apart. He is a cash-cow maximiser par excellence with no equal.